ornia 
Lai 


If** 


PILGRIMS 

In  the  Region  of  Faith 


AMIEL   TOLSTOY 
PATER  NEWMAN 


A   Thesis  with  Illustrations 

by 
JOHN  A.  HUTTON,  M.  A, 

AUTHOR    OF    "GUIDANCE    PROM 
ROBERT    BROWNING   IN   MATTERS   OF   FAITH" 


CINCINNATI:    JENNINGS  AND  GRAHAM 
NEW    YORK:    EATON    AND    MAINS 


COFYRIGHT,    1906,     BY 
JENNINGS     AND     GRAHAM. 


MY  MOTHER 


PILGRIMS 

In  the  Region  of  Faith 


Preface 

IT  was  one  of  the  happy  surmises  of  sim- 
pler days — a  surmise  which  received  much 
support  in  well-tested  facts — that,  by  the 
benign  appointment  of  God,  wherever  poi- 
sonous plants  were  to  be  found  ready  tQ 
deceive  the  unwary,  or  creeping  things 
with  poison  in  their  tongues,  there  also 
were  to  be  found  the  very  herbs  and  balms 
which  would  grapple  with  the  element  of 
death  in  them ;  that  the  soil  which  bore  the 
bane,  nourished  the  antidote. 


I  am  quite  sure  that  it  is  true  wisdom 
and  the  one  effective  method  to  answer  an 

7 


2501066 


Preface 

age  out  of  its  own  mouth.  God  hath  not 
left  Himself  without  witness,  and  least  of 
all  in  the  century  which  has  just  closed,  the 
century  on  whose  spiritual  products  we 
are  living. 

One  proof  that  an  Invincible  Mind  is 
dealing  with  us  for  our  well-being  is  that 
every  powerful  mood  which  invades  or 
infects  an  age  has  already  a  touch  of  its 
own  opposite:  that  what  is  all  the  fashion 
is  already  nigh  unto  perishing:  that  reac- 
tions, relentings,  protests  do  arise  out  of 
the  unplumbed  depths  of  the  soul  of  man. 

We  are  strangers  and  pilgrims  on  the 
earth.  As  often  as  we  forget  that  this  is 
our  predestined  lot — source  at  once  of  our 
grandeur  and  gloom,  and  think  to  settle 
down  upon  some  solving  word  as  though 
it  were  final — and  this  either  on  the  right 
hand  (as  did  Newman),  or  on  the  left  (as 
do  many) — forthwith  things  begin  to  gather 
within  us  and  about  us  which  make  us  un- 
happy or  afraid,  and  we  rise  again,  because 
we  must,  and  strike  our  tents  and  pursue 
8 


Preface 

our  further  way.  It  is  one  mark  of  the 
people  of  God  that,  like  Abraham  and  Isaac 
and  the  children  of  promise,  they  "dwell  in 
tabernacles, ' '  in  temporary  habitations  of  the 
Spirit,  in  places  wherein  to  rest  for  a  time, 
wherein  to  lose  the  immediate  strain, 
wherein  to  await  the  call  of  God  to  the  next 
stage  and  venture  of  the  Spirit. 


The  substance  of  what  is  here  given  on 
"Newman"  appeared  in  the  first  issue  of 
The  Union  Magazine.  In  what  I  have 
written  on  that  great  and  good  man  I  de- 
tect a  tone  of  controversy  which  I  should 
have  avoided  if  I  had  known  how  to  write 
differently  and  yet  to  be  quite  faithful 
to  myself.  F.  D.  Maurice  characterised 
the  Tractarian  atmosphere  as  that  of  a 
"charmed  dungeon."  I  acknowledge  the 
"charm" — few  days  of  my  life  pass  with- 
out some  contact  with  Newman ;  but  I  see 
the  "dungeon,"  and  have  written  as  I  have 
written.  Newman  is  one  of  those  with 

9 


Preface 

whom  one  must  agree  or  disagree  with  a 
certain  violence. 

He's  sweetest  friend,  or  hardest  foe 

Best  angel  or  worst  devil ; 
I  either  hate  or — love  him  so, 

I  can't  be  merely  civil. 

J.A.  H. 

JKMOND,  NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, 
April,  1906. 


10 


Contents 

CHAP.  PACK 

THESIS  13 

I.     HENRI  FREDERIC  AMIEL  IN  "JOURNAL 

INTIME,"       -  -       23 

II.     WALTER    PATER   IN    "MARIUS   THE 

EPICUREAN,"     -  63 

III.  LEO  TOLSTOY  IN  "  MY  CONFESSION,  ' '  ETC.    1 1 1 

IV.  JOHN  HENRY   NEWMAN   IN    "APOLOGIA 

PRO  Vixi.  Sui"  159 


Thesis 


"  Inexplicable,  in  a  sense,  as  man's  personal  agency  is — nay, 
the  one  perpetual  miracle — it  is  nevertheless  our  surest  datum, 
and  our  clue  to  the  mystery  of  existence. ' ' 

"  It  is  the  pressure  of  the  answer  that  puts  the  question." 


Thesis 

PIERRE  LOTI,  in  the  "Iceland  Fisher- 
man," describes  a  storm  in  the  Arctic  seas 
which  caught  a  Breton  fishing-boat.  The 
hero  of  the  book — the  man  with  whom  he 
is  dealing — was  at  the  wheel,  and  Loti  sets 
forth  the  agitations  of  his  soul,  as,  rising 
from  the  depths  in  him,  they  came  one  after 
another  into  his  face.  At  the  outset,  when 
the  storm  seemed  to  be  but  one  of  many, 
an  emergency  for  which  ordinary  prudence 
and  daring  would  serve,  the  man  at  the 
wheel  showed  no  alarm — jested  even,  and 
that  roughly,  with  his  fellows,  like  youth 
rejoicing  in  that  element  ot  contradiction  in 
which  it  hails  its  task. 

As  the  storm  thickened  and  revealed 
itself  as  no  ordinary  affair,  the  man  held 
his  peace,  except  in  moments  when  strange 
and  senseless  oaths  escaped  him, 

15 


Thesis 

As  the  terror  of  the  deep  began  to  settle 
upon  him,  his  face  became  fixed  and  un- 
natural, like  the  face  of  a  poor,  trapped 
beast. 

As  the  night  gathered  round,  bringing 
no  abatement  of  the  elements,  giving  to 
every  horror  another  turn  of  the  screw,  as 
the  toiling  boat,  burdened  with  water,  no 
longer  rode  upon  the  waves,  but  sagged 
and  struggled  in  the  troughs,  like  one  who 
knows  that  the  day  is  lost,  the  man,  now 
frozen  to  the  wheel,  began  wildly  and  with- 
out consciousness  to  recite  his  prayers. 

At  the  last,  when  all  indeed  was  lost, 
when,  so  to  say,  there  was  no  further  use 
for  a  man's  ordinary  faculties,  that  face, 
white,  hard,  tense  before,  seemed  at  one 
definite  moment  to  kindle  and  soften  as 
though  the  bitterness  of  death  was  past. 
In  place  of  the  terror  of  the  deep,  there 
seemed  to  have  come  the  spirit  of  a  great 
contentment;  instead  of  conflict  and  curs- 
ing and  despair,  the  holy  light  of  some 
difficult  but  accomplished  reconciliation. 
16 


Thesis 

And  with  the  ancient  human  cry  upon  his 
lips — wherein  surely  we  are  not  deceived, 
else  all  is  vain — "Lord,  have  mercy  upon 
me,"  "  Lord,  receive  my  spirit,"  Jan  went 
down  into  the  depths. 

"Thy  way  is  in  the  sea,  and  Thy  paths 
in  the  great  waters  !" 

Differing  greatly  in  tradition,  in  tem- 
perament, in  training,  as  do  these  four 
Pilgrims  who  are  considered  in  the  follow- 
ing pages,  they  arrived  at  the  point  which 
constituted  the  crisis  for  each  of  them  by 
the  force  of  what  were  essentially  the  same 
principles. 

In  every  case  pure  reason  had  brought 
them,  or  was  threatening  to  bring  them,  to 
a  standstill ;  and  they  began  to  resume  an 
energetic  and  harmonious  life,  only  after 
they  had  taken  what,  for  each  of  them  at 
that  moment,  was  a  leap  in  the  dark.  This 
leap  they  took,  not  because  it  was  the  evi- 
dent way  of  truth  for  them — of  that  they 
could  not  speak — but  because  it  was  the 
one  way  of  life.  They  had  arrived  at  a 

17 


Thesis 

lonely  point  in  their  thinking,  where,  as  it 
seemed  to  them,  two  alternatives  were 
alone  intellectually  possible — the  interpre- 
tation of  things  which  implied  God,  and  the 
interpretation  which,  however  men  might 
cover  the  bleakness  of  it  with  words,  in- 
volved the  denial  of  God.  Of  these  two 
alternatives  which  seemed  intellectually 
competent,  one  only,  the  interpretation  of 
faith,  was  possible  on  the  moral  plane. 
From  the  other  they  simply  shuddered. 
Now  in  these  deep  matters,  wherein  a  man 
is  dealing  with  himself  in  an  irrevocable 
way,  a  shudder  is  an  argument. 

They  were  saved  when  they  saw  clearly, 
so  clearly  that  the  insight  had  something 
of  the  constraint  of  a  word  spoken  to  them 
by  the  Author  of  their  being,  that  there  is 
something  in  man  more  primitive  than 
reason,  and  at  the  last  more  authoritative, 
viz.,  the  instinct  to  live,  and  when  they 
permitted  that  elementary  force,  the  force 
of  life  itself  to  carry  them  round  the  diffi- 
cult dead-centre.  One  might,  indeed,  pur- 
18 


Thesis 

sue  the  analogy  of  the  dead-centre  and  the 
fly-wheel,  discovering  many  a  quite  fair 
and  fruitful  parallel.  Particularly  this:  it 
was  no  more  intended  that  we  should  live 
without  the  momentum  of  feeling  and  de- 
sire and  faith,  without  the  inertia  of  a  long 
established  and  actual  world,  than  that  an 
engine  which  was  built  to  run  with  a  fly- 
wheel, and  has  hitherto  run  with  a  fly- 
wheel, should  continue  to  run  after  the 
fly-wheel  had  been  detached. 

As  for  Ami  el,  he  did  not  take  that  leap 
in  the  dark  which  for  him  also  was  the 
strait  gate  unto  life.  He  would  not  permit 
life  to  have  its  generous  way  with  him. 
He  withstood  the  daring  of  his  own  soul. 
That  is  the  pathos  of  his  story,  as  he  him- 
self was  aware.  He  knew  that  it  was  just 
that  which  was  awanting  in  him,  which 
was  essential  to  every  man  who  would  be 
himself. 

We  live  by  faith ;  and  the  event  of  our 
time  in  the  region  of  pure  thought  is  that 
men  are  now  to  be  found  who  are  not 

19 


Thesis 

ashamed  to  say  so,  and  to  defend  the  life 
of  faith  as  the  only  conceivable  and  rational 
way. 

It  may  be  true  that  no  intellectual  justi- 
fication of  a  quite  coercive  and  overwhelm- 
ing force,  no  justification  in  terms  of  reason 
in  the  narrow  sense,  can  be  given  for  the 
very  things  by  which  we  live.  But  we  are 
acting  in  a  becoming  and  necessary  way 
when  we  behave  handsomely  along  the  line 
of  such  evidence  as  we  have,  though  we  go 
beyond  the  evidence  itself.  In  short,  we 
do  well  to  believe  in  the  line  of  our  elemen- 
tary needs.  Certainly,  in  the  dizzy  mo- 
ments when  only  two  ways  lie  before  us, 
and  the  next  step  must  have  something  in 
it  which  shall  be  irrevocable,  it  is  incum- 
bent upon  a  rational  being  to  take  that 
step  which  leads  unto  life. 

So  long  as  we  are  here  in  this  world 
there  will  always  be  a  gap  between  the 
things  of  faith  and  the  things  of  sight ;  but 
it  would  help  a  great  many  people  to  come 
to  peace  with  themselves,  and  to  settle 
20 


Thesis 

down  to  some  good  purpose  in  this  life,  if 
it  could  be  brought  home  to  them  once  for 
all  that  that  gap  in  the  evidence  will  not  be 
filled  up  in  the  experience  of  any  one, 
until  Jie  puts  himself  into  it. 

In  the  building  of  the  bridge  across  the 
Forth,  and  near  to  its  completion,  a  day 
arrived  when  the  two  great  arms  of  the 
central  span  approached  one  another,  until 
they  almost  met  over  the  abyss.  A  space 
however  still  remained ;  though  even  at 
that  stage  it  was  apparent  that  the  bridge 
was  intended  to  be  one, — all  the  labor  from 
the  north  side  to  find  its  complement  and 
justification  in  all  the  labor  from  the  south 
side.  That  narrow  gulf  was  not  spanned, 
the  ideal  was  not  fulfilled,  the  thing  did  not 
become  what  all  the  time  it  was  seeking  to 
be,  until  into  the  blank  interval  the  work- 
men built  the  platform  on  which  at  the  very 
moment  they  were  standing — the  platform 
which  had  supported  them  from  the  begin- 
ning, the  platform  on  which  they  had  done 
all  their  work  from  its  foundations  in  the  sea ! 

21 


Thesis 

Between  faith  and  sight,  between  the 
seen  and  the  unseen,  between  the  evidence 
for  anything  which  is  purely  good  and  the 
corroboration,  there  will  always  be  an  un- 
bridged  space,  a  cleft,  a  halting  on  the  one 
side  and  on  the  other,  everything  indeed 
recommending  that  the  breach  be  closed 
in  order  that  we  may  proceed  as  men  with 
our  real  business  in  the  world.  But  nothing 
will  serve  to  bring  the  two  together  except 
that  a  man  put  himself  into  the  breach. 
Once  more,  we  live  by  faith ;  what  God 
hath  joined  together,  let  not  man  put 
asunder. 


22 


Henri  Frederic  A  mi  el 


"Be  not  afraid  of  life.  Believe  that  life  is  worth  living  and 
your  belief  will  help  to  create  the  fact.  The  scientific  proof  that 
we  are  right  may  not  be  clear  before  the  day  of  judgment  is 
reached.  But  the  faithful  fighters  of  this  hour,  or  the  beings 
that  then  and  there  represent  them,  may  then  turn  to  the  faint- 
hearted who  here  decline  to  go  on,  with  words  like  those  with 
which  Henry  IV.  greeted  the  tardy  Crillon  after  a  great  victory 
had  been  gained :  '  Go  and  hang  yourself,  brave  Crillon,  we 
fought  at  Arques  and  you  were  not  there."  " 

"What  makes  a  man  is  the  sense  that  he  has  committed 
himself." 


Henri  Frederic  A  mi  el 

IN  Dante's  "Inferno"  the  way  to  Hell 
proper  lies  through  the  Stygian  Mere.  In 
the  city  of  Dis,  which  forms  the  vestibule 
to  Hell  proper,  just  within  its  gates,  the 
souls  of  those  who  in  this  life  denied  the 
essential  things  of  faith,  endure  eternally 
the  fruits  of  their  choice.  The  point  is 
that,  according  to  this  infallible  wizard  of 
the  soul,  who  never  uses  an  idle  word, 
doubt  or  denial  of  God  is  a  condition  which 
men  come  to  as  the  result  of  the  misman- 
agement of  their  own  hearts,  as  the  result 
in  one  way  or  another  of  some  private 
moral  failure.  In  that  dreary  Stygian 
marsh,  which  in  Dante's  scheme  leads  to 
the  abode  of  the  doubters,  the  souls  of  the 
sullen  lie  buried  in  the  clammy  ooze. 
These  are  they  who  in  this  present  life 
were  guilty  of  the  sin  of  sadness.  They 

25 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

permitted  a  certain  gloom  to  hang  like  lazy 
smoke  about  their  hearts.  They  invited 
the  sense  of  discouragement  to  stay  with 
them.  They  lingered  upon  their  own  pri- 
vate reasons  for  being  sad,  and  thus  dur- 
ing their  lifetime  dwelt  in  an  atmosphere 
of  lament  and  dimness.  They  would  not 
stir  up  their  souls  to  take  hold  on  God. 
They  would  not  permit  the  fresh  air  of  the 
morning,  the  glorious  light  of  the  sun,  to 
have  its  generous  way  with  them,  to  lead 
them  out  into  manly  and  cheerful  acts. 
They  would  not  assert  themselves  and  claim 
God  against  the  thraldom  of  the  disabling 
gloom.  Therefore  Dante  convicts  them  of 
sloth.  Beyond  these,  in  that  Inferno  of 
his,  which  is  simply  the  subterranean  cham- 
bers of  the  soul  thrown  upon  a  screen, 
Dante,  I  repeat,  places  the  doubters,  the 
deniers,  next  to  the  slothful,  on  the  side 
farther  from  the  light,  nearer  to  the  utter- 
most state  of  darkness.  In  his  view,  that 
is  to  say  once  again,  doubt  or  denial  may 
creep  upon  the  human  soul  and  harden 
26 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

over  it  like  a  crust,  not  so  much  in  conse- 
quence of  this  or  that  particular  incident 
in  the  man's  intellectual  life,  but  as  a  last 
result  of  his  permitting  the  disheartening 
things  of  human  experience  to  weigh  un- 
duly upon  him,  to  dwell  habitually  with 
him.  According  to  Dante  one  may  sink 
into  an  invincible  attitude  of  doubt  or  de- 
nial, by  simply  encouraging  within  one- 
self the  sad  or  dismal  view  of  things,  by 
refusing  to  entertain  the  evidence  on  the 
other  side,  giving  it  equal  weight :  nothing 
worse  than  that.  But  there  is  not  any- 
thing which  could  be  worse  for  beings 
such  as  we  are,  who  have  been  sent  into 
the  world,  not  to  hesitate  about  things,  but 
to  live  our  life  once  for  all,  with  all  our 
strength. 

When  all  is  said,  there  you  have  Amiel's 
story,  with  something  of  injustice  indeed, 
the  injustice  which  we  always  perpetrate 
when  we  try  to  find  in  the  warm  and 
various  life  of  any  man  the  mere  illustra- 
tion of  a  principle.  But  on  his  own  con- 

27 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

fession,  repeated  again  and  again,  that  was 
Amiel's  malady,  his  sin,  in  Dante's  bolder 
phrase. 

Henri  Frederic  Amiel  was  born  at 
Geneva  in  September,  1821.  He  belonged 
to  one  of  the  families  who  had  fled  to 
Geneva  after  the  Revocation  of  the  Edict 
of  Nantes.  He  inherited  therefore  the 
Protestant  and  Calvinistic  strain.  In  our 
day,  when  we  have  accepted,  it  may  be, 
even  too  solemnly,  the  doctrine  of  heredity, 
the  circumstance  that  Amiel  came  of  such  a 
stock  is  not  to  be  neglected.  It  explains 
something  in  him  which  otherwise  it  would 
be  hard  to  account  for.  Whatever  charges 
may  be  brought  against  Calvinism,  one 
thing  can  never  be  denied  to  it — it  brought 
men  and  left  them  face  to  face  with  God. 
But  in  bringing  a  man  face  to  face  with 
God  you  emphasize  and  define  his  own 
personality,  so  that  henceforth  he  sees  him- 
self alone,  with  a  certain  majesty  of  be- 
haviour as  proper  to  him  and  incumbent 
upon  him.  Whosoever  has  been  born  of 
28 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

that  line  will  never  be  able,  in  spite  of  the 
moral  confusion  which  enlightenment  may 
introduce  into  his  later  life,  to  rid  himself 
of  the  idea  that  in  the  universe  he  stands 
alone,  distinct  to  himself  and  to  God,  re- 
sponsible and  free.  Amiel  was  never  able, 
at  heart  he  was  not  disposed,  to  lose  en- 
tirely this  sense  of  the  reality  of  the  human 
personality.  He  was  a  Hegelian  with  a 
difference.  He  never  found  solace  in  any 
philosophical  view  which  threatened  to  ex- 
tinguish the  individual  in  the  play  of  mighty 
and  universal  forces.  He  would  speak  of 
sin,  and  saw  no  prospect  of  better  things 
for  the  world  except  by  the  moral  regener- 
ation of  individuals. 

Amiel  was  left  an  orphan  at  the  age  of 
twelve,  and  this  circumstance  doubtless 
helped  to  confirm  that  habit  of  solitariness 
which  became  at  once  the  source  of  his 
greatness,  and,  when  all  is  said,  of  his 
failure.  There  were  few  events  in  his  life. 
He  was  known  with  any  degree  of  inti- 
macy only  to  a  small  circle  of  friends.  Those 

29 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

friends,  knowing  the  range  and  depth  of 
Amiel' s  culture,  were  always  in  expecta- 
tion that  one  day  he  would  give  to  the  world 
some  really  great  work.  But  as  the  years 
passed  and  no  great  work  was  forthcoming, 
they  became  impatient,  and,  it  would 
appear,  did  not  hide  from  their  friend  that 
they  considered  him  wanting  in  energy. 
He  was  always  industrious,  exacting  of  him- 
self, and  yet  so  far  as  results  showed  all  to 
little  purpose. 

"We  could  not  understand,"  says 
Scherer,  "how  it  was  a  man  so  richly  gifted 
produced  nothing,  or  only  trivialities." 

At  the  age  of  twenty-one  Amiel  went 
to  Germany  for  purposes  of  study.  He 
remained  there  seven  years.  They  were, 
by  his  own  statement,  the  happiest  of  his 
life.  At  that  time  Germany  seemed  to 
have  a  monopoly  of  the  world's  first-rate 
minds,  quite  indisputably  of  the  world's 
first-rate  thinkers.  Looking  upon  those 
days  from  this  distance  of  time,  what  an 
outbreak  of  the  soul,  of  the  spiritual,  it 
30 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

was!  What  boldness,  what  imagination, 
thought  losing  itself  in  poetry,  reason  hov- 
ering on  the  edge  of  dreams  !  This  atmos- 
phere penetrated  Amiel,  for  he  was  by 
temperament  predestined  to  it.  On  return- 
ing to  Geneva  he  was  appointed  to  the 
Chair  of  ^Esthetics  at  the  University,  and 
five  years  later  became  Professor  of  Moral 
Philosophy.  Once  again  he  failed  to  realize 
the  anticipations  of  those  who  knew  his 
gifts.  The  fact  was  that  Geneva,  in  those 
days  of  political  stir  and  change,  was  no 
place  for  a  man  of  Amiel' s  brooding  dis- 
position. He  stood  aloof  from  the  enter- 
prises that  were  on  foot,  and  incurred  the 
penalty — he  was  left  alone.  Yet  all  the 
while  Amiel' s  was  a  nature  which  craved 
society,  and  needed  the  support  of  those 
who  believed  in  him.  But  he  was  also  one 
of  those  to  whom  friends  must  come,  for  he 
could  not  seek  them.  It  is  most  likely  that 
the  people  with  whom  he  came  into  con- 
tact considered  him  a  close  person,  who,  it 
might  be,  secretly  despised  them  all,  who 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

in  any  case  was  sufficient  for  himself; 
whereas,  as  we  come  to  learn,  he  hungered 
for  encouragement,  for  friends,  for  the 
presence  of  those  who  could  understand 
him.  He  was  at  no  time  a  strong  man 
physically.  Indeed,  it  puts  us  at  the 
proper  point  of  view  for  estimating  Amiel, 
to  remember  at  every  stage  that  he  was 
something  of  an  invalid.  His  wisdom  is 
the  wisdom  of  those  who  are  ailing.  His 
wonderful  outbursts  of  serenity  and  recon- 
ciliation with  himself  are  the  touching  and 
pathetic  recoveries  of  one  who  is  never  for 
one  moment  otherwise  than  fundamentally 
ill.  He  died  in  April,  1881. 

We  have  passed  thus  hurriedly  over  the 
outward  facts  of  Amiel's  life  for  the  reason 
that  for  our  pupose  those  which  we  have 
alluded  to  are  the  salient  ones.  Further, 
Amiel's  real  history  is  the  record  of  his 
opinions,  his  feelings  and  musings,  his 
hopes,  his  misgivings,  his  haunting  sense 
of  defeat.  "Let  the  living  live,"  he  wrote 
while  he  was  still  young,  anticipating  the 
32 


Henri  Frederic  Amid 

event,  "let  the  living-  live,  and  you  gather 
together  your  thoughts,  leave  behind  you 
a  legacy  of  feelings  and  ideas ;  you  will  be 
most  useful  so." 

It  often  happens  that  only  when  a  man 
has  died,  and  from  the  manner  of  his  death, 
do  we  get  that  knowledge  of  him  which 
enables  us  to  do  him  justice.  We  blame 
a  man  for  violence  of  temper,  it  may  be, 
— and,  when  all  is  known,  he  may  be  to 
blame.  But  he  comes  to  die.  We  learn 
the  cause  of  his  death — some  affection  of 
the  heart — and  immediately  we  see  our  old 
friend  almost  justified.  Or  we  blame  a 
man,  and  this  brings  us  nearer  to  Amiel,  for 
not  doing  work  which  we  think  he  might 
do.  We  become  impatient  of  him  and 
pronounce  him  timid  or  lazy :  but  we  learn 
at  last,  and  when  we  can  no  longer  ask  his 
forgiveness,  that  he  was  so  constituted,  so 
limited  by  some  malady  which  lay  always 
in  the  background,  ready  to  take  advantage 
of  him,  that,  on  the  whole,  he  did  what  he 
could. 

3  33 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

The  story  is  told  of  a  Scottish  professor 
who  called  up  a  student  to  read  and  con- 
strue. "Hold  your  book  in  the  other 
hand,"  said  the  professor.  The  student 
went  on  reading,  apparently  paying  no 
heed.  "  Do  you  hear  me,  sir?"  The  stu- 
dent ceased  reading,  still  holding  the  book 
as  before.  "  Sir !  "  shouted  the  professor. 
Whereupon  the  student  raised  his  other 
arm — from  which  the  hand  had  been  cutoff! 
It  is  said  that  the  professor  rushed  from  his 
desk  and,  kneeling  before  the  student, 
pleaded,  "Will  you  ever  be  able  to  forgive 
me?" 

Amiel  died,  having  given  nothing  to 
the  world  in  any  way  worthy  of  his  peculiar 
powers,  but  he  left  behind  him  a  work, 
which  at  once  was  the  worthy  labour  of  a 
lifetime,  and  at  the  same  time  goes  far  to 
justify  his  long  delay.  Amiel  is  so  exclu- 
sively known  by  the  "Journal"  which  he 
left  behind  him,  which  was  published  a  year 
after  his  death,  that  when  we  use  his  name 
we  mean  his  book.  When  we  say  Amiel 
34 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

we  mean  his  "  Journal,"  just  as  when  we 
say  Bunyan  we  mean  the  "  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress," and  when  we  say  Augustine  we 
mean  the  "Confessions." 

When  the  "Journal"  appeared,  that 
happened  which  takes  place  when  a  new 
constellation  floats  into  our  sky.  Those 
who  are  always  on  the  lookout  for  any 
sincere  treatment  of  life,  hailed  the  new 
star,  and  communicated  the  discovery  to 
one  another  and  to  the  world ;  and  soon  it 
became  common  knowledge,  amongst  those 
at  least  for  whom  such  souls  as  Amiel' s 
signify,  that  a  new  light  had  taken  up  its 
abiding  place  in  the  firmament  of  confes- 
sional literature.  Timid  as  Amiel  was,  he 
seems  to  have  been  confident  that  an 
honourable  place  would  be  found  for  his 
"  Journal ;"  that  it  would  find  its  way  to 
certain  hearts  as  all  sincere  words  do. 

It  would  be  a  pleasure  to  me  to  dwell 
upon  some  of  the  extraordinary  beauties 
of  Amiel's  "Journal,"  its  tenderness,  its 
sorrow,  and  again,  its  knowledge,  its  critical 

35 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

value,  its  guidance  in  matters  of  art,  of 
taste;  its  insight  into  those  systems  of 
thought  which  have  influenced  men  and 
are  still  influencing  us  for  good  or  evil ;  its 
wonderful  power  to  detect  and  name  the 
weakness  which  vitiates  such  systems.  I 
should  have  liked,  too,  to  dwell  on  its 
value  as  a  mirror  of  the  soul  of  man  at 
this  particular  stage  of  time,  of  its  value  in 
helping  us  out  with  many  an  inarticulate 
trouble  of  our  own  ;  to  repeat  some  of  its 
so  chaste  and  memorable  sayings,  prayers, 
cries.  All  this  I  must  deny  myself,  and 
proceed,  as  I  do  now,  to  deal  with  him  as 
a  pilgrim  in  the  things  of  faith. 

The  prevailing  note  in  Amiel  is  one  of 
sadness,  depression,  despair.  We  have 
here  a  man  who  knows  everything,  who 
can  see  the  world  with  the  eyes  of  every- 
body, who  yet,  and  it  may  be  in  conse- 
quence, can  do  nothing  with  all  his  heart 
and  with  all  his  strength.  From  one  point 
of  view  there  is  nothing  different  in  his 
spiritual  career  from  what  is  essential  in 
36 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

the  case  of  every  typical  man  of  the  nine- 
teenth century — from  Goethe  to  Tolstoy. 
Here  once  more  we  have  the  story  of  a 
man  equipped,  presumably  at  the  outset 
of  his  life,  with  that  natural  faith,  so  to  call 
it,  that  light  which  lighteth  every  man  who 
cometh  into  the  world,  which  is  the  endow- 
ment of  birth,  or  the  gift  of  God,  as  you 
choose  to  define  it.  In  his  case  we  must 
allow  indeed  that  this  native  zest  for  life 
was  never  very  heroic  or  robust.  But  it 
was  there,  and  in  a  certain  dim  way  it 
survived  even  to  the  end.  We  see  this 
man  also  encountering  the  spirit  of  inquiry, 
of  criticism,  tasting  of  the  tree  of  knowl- 
edge. We  see  the  inner  ferment  which 
that  contact  produces,  the  increasing  sense 
of  a  contradiction  within  him,  between  his 
original  faith  and  the  world  of  fact  and 
experience.  We  have  seen,  or  we  shall  see, 
concerning  certain  typical  men  of  his  cen- 
tury, how  in  one  way  or  another,  that 
primitive  faith  emerged  from  the  conflict, 
on  the  whole  victorious,  though  not  the 

37 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

same,  and  bearing  many  a  mark.  We 
have  seen,  or  shall  see,  them  one  and  all, 
letting  go  the  faith  by  which  they  lived, 
only  to  take  a  deeper  or  a  higher  hold  of 
it  again.  To  change  the  metaphor,  we  see 
these  typical  men  swept  off  their  feet  for  a 
time,  but  at  length  learning  to  swim,  learn- 
ing to  be  at  home  and  to  be  themselves  in 
the  perilous  element,  or,  in  the  case  of 
Newman,  getting  on  to  a  vessel  which 
happened  to  be  moored  near  by.  In  Amiel 
the  story  does  not  move  on  to  a  crisis,  and 
never  attains  to  the  deliverance  and  solid 
advance  which  come  with  a  crisis.  He 
broods,  and  broods,  and  dies  brooding. 
He  has  not  the  courage  either  to  deny  or 
to  believe  ;  he  will  not  commit  himself  in  any 
final  way  to  faith  or  denial.  He  is  too  good 
a  man  to  do  without  God:  yet  he  knows 
too  much,  he  thinks,  to  believe  without  mis- 
giving in  any  defined  apprehension  of  God. 
Now  can  we  account  for  this  difference 
in  the  spiritual  history  of  Amiel  from  what 
we  find  to  be  characteristic  of  other  pil- 
38 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

grims  of  his  century,  who,  on  the  whole, 
felt  the  same  challenge  to  faith  from  the 
side  of  the  world  ?  I  think  we  can ;  and  it 
leads  us  directly  to  what  I  believe  is  the 
root  of  this  whole  matter. 

In  one  of  his  earliest  pieces  of  writing — 
a  review  from  his  hand  when  he  was  twenty- 
one  years  of  age — Amiel  already  betrays 
a  certain  moral  disposition,  which  he  him- 
self does  not  hesitate  to  call  cowardice. 
He  is  writing  about  the  Renaissance,  about 
that  immense  wave  of  thought,  of  imagina- 
tion, of  all  kinds  of  liberty  and  fruitfulness 
which  swept  over  Europe  in  the  Middle 
Ages.  Everything  that  Amiel  says  about 
the  results  of  that  movement  is  quite  true : 
the  significant  thing,  the  sad  thing,  is  that 
at  twenty-one  he  should  have  said  it.  At 
twenty-one,  by  the  decree  of  God,  we 
should  all  be  omniscient,  ready  for  any- 
thing hard  and  strange.  It  is  true  that  the 
Renaissance  unsettled  the  old  sanctions 
for  life,  introduced  disturbing  and  qualify- 
ing ideas,  and  that  in  the  transition  and 

39 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

anarchy  which  followed  certain  beautiful 
and  established  things  were  unseated  and 
destroyed.  But  at  twenty-one  a  man's 
eyes  should  rather  be  upon  the  compensa- 
tions and  advantages  that  come  with 
change.  He  should — to  confine  ourselves 
for  the  moment  to  this  matter  of  the  Re- 
naissance— have  eyes  only  for  the  wealth 
in  literature  and  art  which  that  shaking 
revolution  brought  into  being;  for  the 
pictures,  for  the  poems,  for  the  new  stir 
and  joy  of  life,  tor  the  new  sense  that  the 
world  was  vaster  than  men  had  dreamed ; 
for  the  spirit  of  prophecy,  that  there  were 
Americas  to  be  discovered,  Americas  be- 
yond seas  indeed,  but  Americas  also,  un- 
traversed  continents  at  home,  and  in  the 
heart  of  man.  An  able  youth  of  twenty-one 
should  have  had  eyes  only  for  such  things. 
Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  how  did  Amiel 
write?  "The  Renaissance  perhaps  robbed 
us  of  more  than  it  gave  us."  Quite  true: 
and  if  that  were  all  or  were  exceptional, 
it  would  only  mean  a  wonderful  maturity 
40 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

of  mind  in  one  so  young.  It  would  mean, 
too,  that  Amiel  was  so  true  to  his  Calvin- 
istic  and  Puritan  strain,  that  in  his  view 
anything  was  had  too  dearly,  which  even 
for  a  day  imperilled  the  holiness  and 
chastity  of  the  soul.  But  he  continues: 
"There  remains  the  question  whether  the 
greatest  problems  which  have  ever  been 
guessed  on  earth  had  not  better  have  re- 
mained buried  in  the  brain  which  had  found 
the  key  to  them,  and  whether  the  deepest 
thinkers — those  whose  hand  has  been  bold- 
est in  drawing  aside  the  veil,  and  their  eye 
keenest  in  fathoming  the  mystery  beyond 
it — had  not  better,  like  the  prophet  of  Ilion, 
have  kept  for  Heaven,  and  Heaven  only, 
secrets  and  mysteries  which  human  tongue 
can  not  truly  express  nor  human  intelli- 
gence conceive."  You  have  there  an  utter- 
ance which  has  parallels  in  Newman ;  and 
the  root  idea  of  it  is  a  certain  cowardice,  a 
certain  want  of  faith  in  the  human  enter- 
prise, really  a  want  of  faith  in  God,  who 
has  laid  down  the  conditions  of  life  and  of 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

knowledge.  What  he  says  is  virtually  this : 
That  since  the  instinct  to  inquire,  to  learn, 
to  put  questions,  leads  to  changes  and  dis- 
locations, which  may  bring  trouble  and 
moral  peril  to  individuals  or  to  a  particular 
generation,  it  would  be  better  if  men  were 
to  stop  thinking — if  they  were  to  that  ex- 
tent to  mutilate  themselves,  so  that  we 
might  all  have  peace.  Now,  a  man  with 
Newman's  temperament  could  say  that, 
and,  having  adopted  it  as  a  final  principle, 
could  find  refuge  in  it,  as  he  did.  But 
Amiel  was  a  child  of  the  Reformed  Church 
so  far  that  he  had  the  incurable  instinct  to 
think  out  his  way.  That  made  the  tragedy 
of  his  life.  He  could  not  but  think  out  his 
way;  he  could  never  have  accepted  life 
with  the  condition  that  at  a  certain  stage 
sincere  thought  should  be  discredited ;  and 
yet  at  the  same  time  he  was  paralysed  by 
an  idea  which  mocked  him,  that  there  was 
no  finality,  no  permanent  worth  or  comfort 
in  mere  thinking. 

You  come  to  a  view  of  Amiel,  not  es- 
42 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

sentially  different  from  this,  if  you  consider 
for  a  moment  a  defect  in  his  character, 
which  he  himself  dwells  on  frequently  and 
always  with  regret.  He  could  not  bring 
himself  to  act.  He  would  never  commit 
himself.  He  would  never  let  himself  go, 
and  thus  test  the  foundations  of  the  world. 
He  might,  as  he  himself  saw  clearly,  have 
saved  himself  from  despair  ;  he  might  have 
opened  a  way  within  himself  for  a  new  tide 
of  energy  and  joy,  if  he  had  only  declared 
that  he  was  in  love  and  had  married ;  or 
if  he  had  compelled  himself  even  to  so 
little  as  the  regular  publication  of  literary 
work.  But  he  shrank  from  the  definite, 
from  the  completed,  from  the  concrete ; 
and  his  "Journal"  is  the  record,  first  and 
last,  of  the  retribution  which  overtakes  all 
such  abstinence  from  life.  "I  have  too 
much  imagination,  conscience,  and  pene- 
tration," he  writes,  "and  not  enough  char- 
acter." That  is  the  root  of  his  malady.  It 
is  what  Dante  meant  by  sloth,  by  the  sin 
of  sadness,  which  is  the  approach  to  the 

43 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

state  of  complete  denial.  "To  love,  to 
dream,  to  feel,  to  learn,  to  understand — 
all  these  are  possible  to  me,  if  only  I  may 
be  dispensed  from  willing."  If  only  I  may 
be  dispensed  from  willing — there  you  have 
the  key  to  Amiel.  "Practical  life  makes 
me  afraid;  and  yet  at  the  same  time  it 
attracts  me;  I  have  need  of  it.  Family 
life,  especially  in  all  its  delightfulness,  in  all 
its  moral  depth,  appeals  to  me  almost  like 
a  duty.  Sometimes  I  can  not  escape  from 
the  ideal  of  it.  A  companion  of  my  life, 
of  my  work,  of  my  thoughts,  of  my  hopes  ; 
within,  a  common  worship ;  to  the  world 
outside,  kindness  and  beneficence ;  educa- 
tions to  undertake,  the  thousand  and  one 
moral  relations  which  develop  round  the 
first — all  these  ideas  intoxicate  me  some- 
times. But  I  put  them  aside,  because  every 
hope  is  as  it  were  an  egg  from  whence  a 
serpent  may  issue  instead  of  a  dove ;  be- 
cause every  joy  missed  is  a  stab ;  because 
every  seed  confided  to  destiny  contains  an 
ear  of  grief  which  the  future  may  develop." 
44 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

"  I  am  distrustful  of  myself  and  of  hap- 
piness because  I  know  myself.  The  ideal 
poisons  for  me  all  imperfect  possessions." 

"To  be  dependent  is  to  me  terrible; 
but  to  depend  upon  what  is  irreparable, 
arbitrary,  and  unforeseen,  and  above  all  to 
be  so  dependent  by  my  own  thoughts  and 
through  my  own  errors — to  give  up  liberty 
and  hope,  to  slay  sleep  and  happiness — 
this  would  be  Hell !" 

"All  that  is  necessary,  providential,  in 
short,  unimputable,  I  could  bear,  I  think, 
with  some  strength  of  mind.  But  re- 
sponsibility mortally  envenoms  grief ;  and 
as  an  act  is  essentially  voluntary,  therefore 
I  act  as  little  as  possible." 

All  the  while  he  saw  quite  clearly  to 
what  end  this  attitude  of  his  would  lead. 
"He  who  is  silent  is  forgotten  ;  he  who 
abstains  is  taken  at  his  word  ;  he  who  does 
not  advance  falls  back;  he  who  stops  is 
overwhelmed,  distanced,  crushed ;  he  who 
ceases  to  grow  greater  becomes  smaller  ; 
he  who  leaves  off  gives  up  ;  the  stationary 

45 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

condition  is  the  beginning  of  the  end — it 
is  the  terrible  symptom  which  precedes 
death.  To  live  is  to  achieve  a  perpetual 
triumph ;  it  is  to  assert  oneself  against 
destruction,  against  sickness,  against  the  an- 
nulling and  dispersion  of  one's  physical  and 
moral  being  ;  it  is  to  will  without  ceasing, 
or  rather  to  refresh  one's  will  day  by  day." 
And  now  let  us  ask  ourselves  whether, 
things  being  as  they  are,  a  man  like  Amiel 
who  proposes,  so  to  speak,  to  take  up 
with  life  upon  certain  conditions,  condi- 
tions which  the  common  sense  and  expe- 
rience of  man  hold  to  be  a  vain  imagina- 
tion— whether  such  a  man,  proposing  such 
conditions,  is  ever  likely  to  arrive  at  a 
solid  happiness  in  this  world,  or  to  be  able 
to  see  his  way  clearly  in  the  region  of 
ultimate  truths.  Amiel  refuses — I  should 
like  to  qualify  the  phrase  and  bring  it  more 
into  harmony  with  the  delicacy  and  ten- 
derness of  his  attitude,  but  the  word  is 
not  unfair — Amiel  refuses  to  take  part  in 
life,  and  this  on  the  ground  that  every  act 
46 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

which  a  man  commits,  commits  him  and 
gives,  as  it  were,  a  hostage  to  the  future. 
Therefore  he  will  abstain.  He  admits  that 
generous  impulses  urge  him  at  times  to 
do  something  decisive,  something  which 
indeed  will  to  that  extent  limit  his  life,  but 
at  the  same  time  will  express  and  define 
his  life,  giving  it  a  kind  of  objective  real- 
ity. But  he  pulls  himself  up  on  the 
threshold  of  action.  Now  there  is  simply 
no  doubt  at  all  that  those  who  take  up 
such  an  attitude,  cut  themselves  off  from 
certain  fountains  of  insight  and  joy,  and 
deprive  themselves  of  those  corrobora- 
tions  which  have  always  formed  an  essen- 
tial part,  it  may  be  even  the  basis,  of  the 
total  wisdom  of  mankind.  You  can  not 
see  things  until  you  are  there.  We  know 
that  all  the  knowledge  which  we  come  to 
have,  the  whole  life  of  our  mind  and  heart 
is  provoked,  is  solicited  out  of  the  depths  by 
the  demands  which  life  presents.  A  child 
in  performing  a  task  does  something  more ; 
he  discovers,  he  creates  his  mind,  he  adds 

47 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

to  and  defines  his  own  personality.  Well, 
we  might  pursue  that  line  quite  legiti- 
mately until  we  arrived  at  this :  that  the 
greater  the  responsibilities  we  undertake 
and  discharge,  the  fuller  and  wiser  will  be 
our  knowledge  of  ourselves  and  of  the 
world.  But,  not  to  dwell  upon  that,  it  is 
certain  that  there  is  a  spiritual  reaction 
which  is  really  the  glow  of  moral  health, 
following  upon  and  flowing  from  every 
deed  in  which  we  really  commit  ourselves, 
and  this  becomes  in  turn  a  kind  of  evi- 
dence that  we  are  on  the  true  way.  In 
other  words,  the  mere  spectators  in  this 
world  see  nothing  of  the  game.  You 
must  be  in  it  before  you  can  say  how  it 
feels.  A  man  who  simply  ponders  his 
duty  has  all  the  yoke  of  life  without  the 
anointing  ;  whereas  there  is  something  like 
the  whisper  of  a  "Well  done"  at  every 
step  whereby  a  man  seeks  to  discharge 
his  evident  duty  and  calling  as  a  man. 
The  Greeks  had  a  myth  enshrining  some 
such  truth  as  this.  Antaeus,  in  order  to 
48 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

maintain  his  power  of  soaring  in  the  air, 
must  needs  at  intervals  descend  and  touch 
the  earth  with  his  foot.  The  moral  deeds 
of  life,  the  deeds  in  which  a  man  commits 
and  engages  himself,  are  just  those  points 
of  the  earth  which  the  heavenly  being  in 
man,  the  pure  spirit  must  touch,  in  order 
that  he  may  soar  again.  To  shrink  from 
life,  from  actual  moral  performances,  as 
Amiel  did,  is  to  put  oneself  out  of  connec- 
tion with  certain  compensations,  lights, 
whispers,  which  are  themselves  like  wind 
to  the  heavenly  flame.  Tolstoy  had  this 
very  matter  in  view  when  he  laid  down 
five  conditions  which  a  man  must  satisfy 
before  he  has  any  right  to  look  for  peace 
of  mind,  before  he  can  expect  also  to  have 
a  sane  and  healthy  outlook  upon  life,  and 
towards  the  future.  One  of  these  condi- 
tions is  that  he  must  not  break  the  link 
between  himself  and  the  world  of  nature 
— what  Jean  Paul  meant,  in  part,  when  he 
said  that  every  day  should  close  with  a 
look  at  the  stars.  A  second  condition  is 

4  49 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

that  a  man  must  work,  actually  labor  with 
his  hands,  so  that  he  may  have  a  zest  for  his 
food,  may  sleep  soundly  and  awake  with 
happiness.  The  third — and  I  go  no  fur- 
ther— is  family  life,  the  very  duties,  claims, 
responsibilities,  delights,  which  Amiel  him- 
self sees  and  desires  and  turns  away  from. 
Since  these  are  among  the  conditions  on 
which  God  intends  our  life  to  be  lived,  it 
may  well  be  that  no  man  has  the  right  to 
speak  about  life,  about  what  he  needs  and 
about  what  is  given,  until  he  fulfills  those 
conditions  in  fact,  or  realizes  them  by  the 
force  of  his  imagination. 

In  Amiel,  to  look  at  this  matter  from 
another  standpoint,  we  have  an  example 
of  a  man  who  sees  so  many  things  at  once, 
who  is  so  many-poised,  that  he  can  not 
bring  himself  to  act  decisively  on  any 
plain  issue  in  life.  His  instinct,  which,  of 
course,  would  have  urged  him  to  act  was 
balanced  in  his  case  by  a  sleepless,  critical 
faculty — the  Mephistopheles  of  Faust — 
which  persuaded  him  that  there  were  always 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

reasons  on  the  other  side  for  not  acting, 
or  for  acting  differently.  In  him  instinct 
and  knowledge  cancelled  one  another,  so 
that  he  simply  stood  still.  As  he  became 
aware  that  this  was  his  condition,  as  every 
failure  to  act  confirmed  his  habit  of  not 
acting,  his  moral  hesitancy  became  morbid 
and  fixed.  He  is  a  Hamlet  of  these  latter 
days,  one  in  whom  "the  native  hue  of 
resolution  is  sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast 
of  thought."  Amiel  is  a  classical  instance 
of  the  man  in  whom  culture  or  knowledge 
has  weakened  certain  elementary  powers, 
faiths,  instincts,  in  the  absence  of  which, 
nevertheless,  a  man  ceases  to  be  himself. 
He  will  not  commit  himself  in  any  particu- 
lar case — he  sees  so  much  on  the  other 
side  and  on  all  sides.  He  will  not  apply 
himself  to  one  thing — there  are  in  this 
world  so  many  things.  Now,  if  in  any  urg- 
ent matter,  either  of  duty  or  of  faith,  a  man 
refuses  to  act,  to  make  a  personal  choice, 
simply  because  there  are  so  many  facts 
and  circumstances  in  the  world,  which, 

51 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

if  he  only  knew  them  all,  might  lead  him 
to  act  differently,  or  refrain  from  acting 
altogether,  that  man  is  going  against  the 
ordinary  practice  of  life  in  every  region. 
If  he  were  to  adopt  such  a  principle  con- 
sistently, he  would  do  nothing  at  all,  in- 
deed he  would  become  a  maniac.  For 
example,  at  this  particular  moment  of  time, 
everything  so  to  speak,  is  happening 
everywhere.  Outside  the  stars  are  shin- 
ing, the  wind  is  blowing,  ships  are  sailing 
the  seas,  tigers  are  devouring  their  prey, 
men  are  drowning,  starving,  women  are 
weeping,  houses  are  burning  to  the  ground ; 
there  are  prisons,  there  are  hospitals,  there 
are  asylums ;  in  operating  theatres  limbs 
are  being  amputated,  obscure  diseases  are 
being  probed — all  these  things,  myriads  of 
things,  whole  continents  of  things,  are  hap- 
pening everywhere  at  this  moment;  and 
yet  for  you,  properly  speaking,  there  is 
but  one  thing :  you  are  reading  this  page. 
You  know  that  in  order  at  this  moment  to 
do  anything,  in  order  to  be  yourself  in  the 
52 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

particular  circumstances  of  the  moment, 
you  must  if  need  be,  put  out  of  your  mind 
all  such  vagrant  and  incoherent  facts  as  I 
have  mentioned.  They  are  all  of  them 
facts,  interesting,  serious,  critical,  and  upon 
occasion  it  may  be  your  duty  to  meet 
them  ;  but  you  know  that  it  would  not  be 
sane  upon  your  part  to  refuse  such  ideas 
as  are  presented  in  this  page,  simply  be- 
cause the  whole  world,  in  its  multitudinous 
details  is  living  its  life  at  the  same  mo- 
ment. Well,  the  same  is  to  be  said  of 
every  definite  situation  in  which  we  are 
called  upon  to  act.  We  must  practice  a 
certain  restraint  upon  vagrant  and  unre- 
lated circumstances.  We  must  select  the 
facts  which  are  essential ;  and  both  intel- 
lectual and  moral  saneness  consists  in 
knowing  what  facts  are  relevant  and  what 
are  idle  and  inadvertent.  Just  as  by  an  act 
of  your  will,  if  need  be,  and  in  order  to 
read  this  page,  you  must  for  the  moment 
neglect  the  entire  world,  and  confine  your- 
self to  the  type  and  to  the  play  of  ideas 

53 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

and  associations  which  it  awakens  in  your 
mind ;  and  by  so  doing — so  far  as  this 
present  moment  is  concerned — you  live 
and  assert  yourself.  So,  in  all  personal 
matters  which  involve  choice,  judgment, 
decision,  in  matters  of  life  or  of  faith, 
what  you  shall  do,  how  you  shall  believe, 
it  is  necessary,  when  face  to  face  with  your 
question,  to  put  away  things  which  are 
obviously  extraneous,  and,  with  what  wis- 
dom you  have,  deal  with  the  issue  within 
narrower  limits.  In  this  way,  by  being 
faithful,  that  is  to  say,  to  himself  in  view 
of  a  narrow  circle  of  relationships,  a  man 
will  find  that  he  is  never  really  unfaithful 
to  the  wider  demands  of  the  whole  world, 
if  he  could  possibly  be  made  aware  of 
those  demands.  Plato  would  have  de- 
stroyed the  family  on  the  ground  that  love 
given  to  one's  friends,  to  one's  home,  was 
love  withdrawn  from  society,  from  the 
wider  human  fellowship.  But  Aristotle 
had  no  difftulty  in  replying,  that  without 
the  family  there  would  be  no  school  for 
54 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

love  at  all,  that  the  corner-stone  of  the 
State  was  the  hearth-stone.  So,  the  only 
school  for  the  widest  moral  practice  is,  to 
be  faithful  in  the  issues  which  meet  us 
within  the  narrower  limits.  To  do  other- 
wise, to  refuse  at  each  step  to  act,  on  the 
ground  that  if  we  only  knew  more,  or 
knew  everything-,  we  should  act  differently, 
or  not  act  at  all,  is  really  to  mutilate  our- 
selves ;  it  is  in  fact  to  propose  an  absurdity. 
The  ultimate  bearing  of  all  these  con- 
siderations and  of  this  argument,  brings  us 
back  to  the  question  which  emerges  upon 
any  series  of  study  of  the  Pilgrims  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  I  mean  the  question 
of  personal  faith  in  the  light,  and  under 
the  challenge  of  that  immense  knowledge 
of  the  world  which  our  age  has  inherited 
and  achieved.  And,  to  keep  close  to 
Amiel,  we  see  in  him  how  the  question 
comes  to  present  itself.  He  fails  to  attain 
to  certitude,  to  a  happy  and  habitual  con- 
fidence in  God  and  in  life's  meaning,  be- 
cause— to  put  it  my  own  way — the  evi- 

55 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

dence  is  not  quite  convincing.  Now,  the 
evidence  for  God  can  never  in  a  sense  be 
convincing  ;  that  is  to  say,  it  can  never  be 
so  indisputable  as  practically  to  coerce 
and  overwhelm  the  human  reason.  Were 
that  to  take  place,  it  would  not  be  faith 
that  ensued.  Further,  Amiel,  as  we  have 
seen,  will  not  take  the  only  course  which, 
as  I  think,  so  far  confirms  such  faith  as  a 
man  has :  he  will  not  proceed  upon  it. 
He  failed,  and  could  not  but  fail,  because 
of  those  two  conditions  by  which  he  bound 
himself.  He  would  not  believe  once  for 
all,  because  he  was  afraid  that  later  knowl- 
edge might  change  his  attitude ;  and  for 
the  same  reason  he  would  not  act  strongly 
upon  such  incipient  faith  as  from  time  to 
time  offered  itself  to  him. 

The  very  nature  of  faith  in  God,  at 
least  so  it  seems  to  me,  demands  that  we 
act  upon  it  on  evidence  short  of  absolute 
proof.  Faith  is  most  truly  faith  when  it 
knows  nothing  but  its  own  inspirations. 
Not  that  faith  is  entirely  without  evidence 
56 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

or  without  very  sound  evidence ;  but  simply 
because  faith  is  always  a  personal  act,  it 
will  always  be  possible  for  the  individual 
to  take  the  other  alternative.  One  thing 
also,  I  think,  may  be  claimed.  There  is  a 
sense  in  which,  to  quote  the  language  of 
remote  days,  man  is  the  measure  of  the 
universe.  What  I  mean  just  now  by  that 
is,  that  the  world,  the  universe,  life,  has  a 
wonderful  way  of  corroborating  that  view  of 
it  which  for  your  own  reasons  you  are  taking. 
Set  out  with  the  idea,  with  the  faith,  that 
life  is  from  the  moral  point  of  view  utterly 
careless,  that  "as  it  happeneth  to  the  wise 
man,  so  it  happeneth  to  the  fool," — and 
the  world,  or  your  experience,  will  support 
that  idea  to  some  length ;  but  only  to  some 
length,  and  that  not  very  far.  Take,  how- 
ever, a  deeper,  a  holier  view  of  things. 
Settle  with  yourself  that  life  is  not  given 
us  for  self-pleasing,  but  for  self-restraint, 
for  the  practice  and  fulfilment  of  certain 
purer  calls,  and  once  more,  now  that  your 
ear  is  trained  to  finer  sounds,  you  will 
57 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

catch  the  approval  of  things,  the  well  done 
of  some  mysterious  and  AUTHORITATIVE 
VOICE.  You  will  feel  that  there  is  some- 
thing in  this  world  which  appeals  to  you 
in  a  dumb,  speechless  way,  to  take  the 
high  road,  the  narrow  road,  through  this 
world  of  ours.  And  even  if  you  have  no 
other  foundation  for  the  life  of  faith,  that 
will  serve,  and  if  you  are  faithtul  to  it,  will, 
at  the  challenge  of  further  things,  become 
for  you  more  and  more. 

Men  like  Amiel  seem  to  be  afraid  to 
believe  heartily  lest  they  should  be  duped ; 
but,  as  Professor  James  says,  "I  have  also 
a  horror  of  being  duped,  but  I  can  believe 
that  worse  things  than  being  duped  may 
happen  to  a  man  in  this  world.  Clifford's 
exhortation  to  us  to  avoid  committing 
ourselves  to  any  form  of  belief,  lest  we 
should  discover  later  on  that  we  had  be- 
lieved wrongly,  is  like  a  general  informing 
his  soldiers  that  it  is  better  to  keep  out  of 
battle  altogether  than  to  risk  a  single 
wound."  And  again,  "As  the  essence  of 
53 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

courage  is  to  stake  one's  life  on  a  possi- 
bility, so  the  essence  of  faith  is  to  believe 
that  that  possibility  exists." 

In  conclusion,  after  reading  Amiel  and 
feeling,  by  our  sympathy  with  him,  the  tor- 
ments of  his  divided  soul — divided  between 
his  natural  instincts,  which  in  him,  as  in  all 
men,  are  on  the  side  of  faith  in  life,  those 
instincts  warmed  in  his  case  by  the  spirit 
of  his  fathers,  it  may  be,  and  by  the  natural 
poetry  of  his  soul, — all  that  on  the  one 
hand ;  and  the  challenge  of  knowledge  on 
the  other:  after  reading  Amiel,  and  wit- 
nessing this  pathetic  struggle,  we  are 
tempted  in  one  or  other  of  two  ways.  We 
are  tempted,  as  he  was  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
one,  to  wish  that  knowledge  might  cease 
from  the  earth.  But  even  could  that  wish 
be  fulfilled,  it  is  even  now  too  late.  The 
fact  is,  it  is  not  an  honorable  wish  at  all. 
God  hath  made  us,  and  not  we  ourselves ; 
He  has  made  us  with  the  faculty  for  knowl- 
edge, and  He  has  placed  us  likewise  in  a 
world  where  knowledge  comes  only  by 

59 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

mental  industry.  The  other  temptation  is 
to  disparage  and  abandon  reason  alto- 
gether, to  hand  ourselves  over  to  some 
visible  guide,  some  institution,  it  may  be, 
which  is  bold  enough  to  declare  that  it  has 
no  misgivings.  Yet  that  may  be  a  tempta- 
tion which  must  be  dealt  with  like  other 
temptations.  It  is  not  fair  or  candid  on 
the  part  of  those  who  ask  us  to  behold  the 
anarchy  into  which  reason  has  plunged  us, 
it  is  not  fair  or  candid,  to  contrast  the  pres- 
ent unsettlement  with  the  state  of  perfect 
quietness,  which  would  ensue,  as  it  is  al- 
leged, were  we  to  render  implicit  obedience 
to  some  visible  and  human  institution.  The 
true  opposition  and  contrast  would  be,  be- 
tween the  present  unsettlement  on  the  one 
hand,  and  the  intellectual  torpor,  the  cru- 
elty, the  superstition,  which  did,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  accompany  the  days  of  unquestion- 
ing obedience.  No,  we  have  no  right  to 
will  implicit  obedience  without  willing  the 
consequences  of  implicit  obedience.  The 
truth  is,  we  must  go  on  fighting  our  battle, 
60 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

not  sadly  at  all,  not  with  an  ultimate  sus- 
picion of  all  things,  but  with  that  ultimate 
confidence  in  all  things,  that  faith  in  God, 
which  Jesus  Christ  asked  us  to  take  once 
for  all  into  our  hearts  and  to  live  by,  in 
spite  of  all  signs. 

The  demand  for  the  quietness  of  cei> 
tainty  may  be  a  demand  which  God  can 
not  honorably  satisfy,  can  not  satisfy,  that 
is  to  say,  without  injuring  us,  and  spoiling 
His  own  plan  in  the  human  enterprise.  In 
every  department  of  our  complicated  life — 
intellectual,  social,  religious — we  are  at 
best  only  on  the  way,  and  therefore,  of 
necessity,  in  movement.  We  can  not  hope 
for  more  than  relative  truth :  we  could  not 
deal  with  more.  Here,  also,  "as  our  day 
is  so  shall  our  strength  be."  And,  "what 
but  the  weakness  in  a  faith,  supplies  the 
incentive  to  humanity?"  The  turning  to 
visible  authority  may  be  nothing  better 
than  a  concession  to  that  love  of  ease  which 
is  ours  in  common  with  all  animals,  but 
which  is  no  mark  of  the  spiritual  man. 
61 


Henri  Frederic  Amiel 

There  is  really  nothing  to  be  deplored  in 
our  apparent  insecurity.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  there  are  lamps  for  faithful  souls.  To 
everyone  who  meets  life  seriously  the  chal- 
lenge comes — to  give  his  vote  for  one  or 
other  of  two  subtle,  yet  distinct  and  con- 
tending views.  True,  he  may  err  in  his 
decisions  ;  but  I  make  bold  to  say  that  the 
errors  of  a  faithful  man  are  before  God  of 
small  account.  Domine,  si  error  est,  a 
Te  decepti  sumus.  Meanwhile,  a  man  has 
not  failed,  if  in  his  choice,  in  his  personal 
and  solemn  vote  on  matters  which  test  the 
foundations  of  his  life,  he  has  decided  for 
that  course  which,  whatever  hazards  it  may 
raise,  seems  to  him  the  worthier. 

"The  solving  word  for  the  learned  and 
the  unlearned  man  alike,  lies,  in  the  last 
resort,  in  the  dumb  willingnesses  and  un- 
willingnesses of  their  interior  characters, 
and  nowhere  else.  It  is  not  in  Heaven, 
neither  is  it  beyond  the  sea  ;  but  the  word 
is  very  nigh  to  thee,  in  thy  mouth  and  in 
thy  heart,  that  thou  may  est  do  it." 
62 


Walter  Pater 


"  The  beauty  of  the  world,  and  its  sorrow,  solaced  a  little  by 
religious  faith,  itself  so  beautiful  a  thing ;  these  were  the  chief 
impressions  with  which  he  made  his  way  outwards." 

PATER,  in  Gaston  de  Latour. 
64 


Walter  Pater 

PROBABLY  there  is  no  one  word  which 
describes  adequately  the  total  impression 
which  Pater  leaves  upon  one  who  reads  him 
with  submissiveness  and  sympathy ;  as 
probably  there  is  no  one  word  which  ad- 
equately describes  the  soul  in  any  posture. 
Nevertheless,  just  as  it  is  possible  to  name 
certain  feelings  which  are  present  with  us 
in  any  powerful  mood,  so  we  may  discrim- 
inate certain  lines  or  waves  of  influence 
which  meet  within  us  when  we  are  under 
the  spell  of  Pater. 

For  one  thing,  we  enjoy  in  him  that 
sense  of  comfort,  so  to  call  it,  which  it  is 
one  of  the  finest  tests  of  style  to  bring 
to  us.  Mere  words,  discreetly  chosen, 
have  a  charm  beyond  their  sense.  This 
may  be,  nay,  must  be,  in  virtue  of  a  pro- 
found and  elementary  correspondence  be- 
5  65 


Walter  Pater 

tween  our  soul  and  any  manifestation  of 
pure  excellence.  Certainly  it  is  one  of  the 
proofs  of  style  in  words  that  they  bring 
about  us  a  certain  atmosphere  of  comfort, 
of  satisfaction,  rising  now  and  then  to  the 
pitch  of  a  real  exhilaration  and  joy. 

It  must  have  been  this,  and  not  any- 
thing merely  violent  and  strange,  that 
Humbolt  had  in  his  mind  when  he  said  it 
would  comfort  him  on  his  deathbed  if  some 
one  would  but  read  to  him  a  few  lines 
from  Homer,  were  it  only  from  the  lists 
of  the  Greek  ships !  He  meant  to  say  that 
choice  and  distinguished  words  themselves, 
apart  from  their  content,  have  a  compos- 
ing and  reconciling  quality ;  that  for  him- 
self they  would  allure  him  into  quietness, 
and  set  his  soul  at  that  angle  from  which 
only  the  hopeful  and  assuaging  things  are 
seen. 

If  words  selected  faultlessly  and  ar- 
ranged have  in  themselves  this  unction,  it 
is  not  strange  that  the  writings  of  Walter 
Pater  have  such  power — I  will  not  say  to 
66 


Walter  Pater 

direct  but — to  nourish  and  promote  the 
soul.  In  the  case  of  Pater,  even  less  than 
that  of  any  other  who  has  pushed  his  way 
into  the  heart  of  things,  can  we  separate 
the  style  from  the  substance  and  intention 
of  his  work.  With  him,  to  a  pre-eminent 
degree,  the  style  is  the  man — the  style  with 
its  strenuousness  and  gravity,  "  always  on 
the  look-out  for  the  sincerities  of  human 
life" — to  quote  his  own  characterisation  of 
another. 

In  his  work  from  first  to  last  he  was 
engaged  with  the  soul  of  man,  beset  as 
man  is  in  Pater's  view  of  him,  by  a  world 
of  incidents,  proceeding  from  himself,  it 
may  be,  or  coming  to  him  from  other  times 
or  from  the  fate  of  nature,  all  of  these  in- 
cidents being  capable  of  setting  up  corre- 
spondence with  man  as  though  he  were 
inhabited  by  a  spirit.  It  is  most  likely  this 
—that  he  is  ever  concerned  with  the  soul, 
with  its  delicate  but  significant  movements 
— which  gives  Pater's  writings  for  one 
something  of  that  power  for  God  which 
67 


Walter  Pater 

one  associates  with  the  more  excellent 
books  of  devotion — with  Thomas  a  Kempis 
and  the  mystics.  He  belongs  to  the  num- 
ber of  elect  ones  who  seem  to  be  urged 
invincibly  to  indicate,  if  not  to  declare,  the 
intimate  history  of  their  souls  —  who 
thereby  minister  to  souls  comparable  to 
their  own  in  essential  things,  to  those  who 
have  ears  to  hear.  Men  of  his  spiritual 
degree,  of  his  sensitiveness — Augustine, 
Dante,  Bunyan,  Goethe,  Carlyle,  Newman, 
Tolstoy,  so  unlike  each  other  in  particulars, 
so  like  in  this  that  each  was  compelled  by 
the  things  of  his  own  spirit  to  urge  and  feel 
his  way  out  of  certain  perplexities,  and  to 
win  what  victory  he  did  win,  for  the  most 
part,  by  laying  bare  his  own  condition — 
fulfill  the  office  of  the  priesthood,  standing 
between  us  and  that  infinite  to  which  our 
spirits  bear  witness,  it  may  be  obscurely. 
That  is  an  ingredient  which  is  ever 
consciously  with  us  so  long  as  we  are  within 
the  influence  of  Pater.  He  does  us  the 
immeasurable  service  of  enabling  us  to  ex- 
68 


Walter  Pater 

press  and  unravel  ourselves.  His  words, 
by  reason  of  their  fine  knowledge,  contin- 
uously make  discoveries  to  us  of  ourselves 
— of  our  latent  and  potential  selves.  They 
become  channels  by  which  our  soul  finds 
its  way  out.  And  with  what  delicacy 
and  reverence  he  deals  with  man !  What 
carefulness  and  reticence  and  hesitation! 
How  he  will  not  speak  out !  How  he  will 
describe  the  behavior  of  the  soul  in  given 
circumstances,  always,  at  the  same  time, 
with  a  deference  to  you  if  you  should  hap- 
pen to  think  differently !  How  he  will  try 
again,  refining  upon  the  previous  predicate ! 
How  he  will  wait  for  the  right  word — the 
word  which  shall  reveal  yet  not  limit  or  fix 
the  soul !  To  this,  I  believe,  we  must  trace 
much  of  the  secret  of  Pater's  spiritual 
charm,  and  of  the  power  over  us  which  he, 
by  his  friendliness  and  consideration  of  us, 
comes  to  possess.  He  will  assert  nothing 
concerning  the  soul  until  we  are  ready  to 
agree.  He  almost  makes  you  say  the  word 
which  ultimately  comes.  Witness,  as  illus- 
69 


Walter  Pater 

trating  what  I  mean,  his  habitual  use  of  all 
manner  of  qualifying  words  and  phrases. 
He  can  scarcely  be  brought  to  say  any- 
thing which  could  have  the  effect  of  defining 
the  soul.  He  will  not  speak  of  a  feeling, 
but  only  of  a  kind  of  feeling,  or  of  a  sort 
of  feeling.  He  will  go  up  and  down  the 
scale  of  qualification  by  tones  and  half- 
tones, listening  to  each,  seeking  to  "soften 
and  modify  the  temerity  of  his  proposi- 
tions" until  the  most  scrupulous  could 
take  no  offence,  but  must  consent. 

It  is  probably  true  that  this  habit  of  qual- 
ification and  endless  misgiving  over  words, 
lest  they  should  bear  within  themselves 
any  "guilt  or  extravagance,"  has  become 
a  mannerism  and  defect  in  Pater.  But  it 
is  the  defect  of  a  quality  which  ministers 
directly  to  his  value  for  the  spirit.  With 
him  it  is  no  affectation,  as  of  one  who  wished 
to  display  his  dexterity  and  niceness.  It 
is  with  him  an  instinctive  courtesy  and  rev- 
erence for  the  soul  in  all  its  sincere,  that 
is  to  say,  in  all  its  truly  personal,  attitudes. 
70 


Walter  Pater 

The  work  of  Pater  will  always  serve  as 
a  kind  of  confessional  for  those  who,  by 
their  temperament  or  mental  history,  are 
aware  of,  and  must  always  be  aware  of,  a 
certain  spirit  of  questioning  in  their  relig- 
ious faith.  And  it  is  from  that  point  of 
view  that  we  shall  go  on  immediately  to 
consider  that  book  of  his  which  contains 
his  most  finished  and  deliberate  message 
on  the  things  of  faith.  There  is  a  stage, 
and  in  our  day  amongst  educated  people 
it  has  become  to  be  almost  a  necessary 
stage,  at  which  the  writings  of  Pater  are 
able  to  define  our  troubles  to  ourselves, 
and,  in  a  way,  to  deal  with  them  as  no 
writer  whom  I  know  can  with  equal  dis- 
cernment. 

For,  Pater  always  honors  and  cherishes 
the  soul.  True,  he  hesitates  on  the  threshold 
of  faith,  but  he  hesitates  with  his  face  toward 
the  door,  nay,  with  his  hand  upon  the  latch. 
He  will  not  turn  away,  he  can  not  turn 
away.  When  all  is  said,  he  finds  what 
ultimate  support  he  has,  in  face  of  baffling 


Walter  Pater 

things,  by  listening  to  the  singing  and  the 
prayers  of  those  who  are  within  the  holy 
place,  and  far  within. 

If  he  is  not  "very  sure  of  God,"  he  is 
profoundly  aware  of  the  human  soul  and 
of  its  boundless  relationships.  He  is  "al- 
most persuaded,"  not  quite;  and  yet  his 
most  personal  writing  has  a  vividness,  a 
power,  a  certain  evidence  of  God,  which 
are  often  not  to  be  felt  at  all  in  the  writ- 
ings of  those  who  profess  that  they  have 
no  doubt,  but  see  God  clearly. 

There  was,  to  the  end,  "a  certain  appe- 
tite for  dimness,"  as  he  calls  it,  in  Pater's 
spiritual  nature.  "Physical  twilight,"  he 
says,  "we  most  of  us  love  in  its  season. 
To  him,  that  perpetual  twilight  came  in 
close  identity  with  its  moral  or  intellectual 
counterpart  as  the  welcome  requisite  for 
that  part  of  the  soul  which  loves  twilight, 
and  is,  in  truth,  never  quite  at  rest  out  of 
it,  through  some  congenital  uneasiness  or 
distress,  perhaps,  in  its  processes  of  vision. 

Because  of  this  unfailing  sympathy  with 
72 


Walter  Pater 

the  human  soul  in  all  its  real  processes, 
however  humble  and  obscure  they  may  be, 
the  best  of  Pater's  work  has  the  salt  of  an 
immortal  life  and  fitness.  To  those  who 
understand,  it  enshrines  the  faithful  record 
of  a  human  pilgrimage.  It  is  "  an  artistic 
reception  of  a  human  experience."  Thus 
far,  at  least,  his  contribution  is  on  the  side 
of  faith,  that  he  will  not  mock  or  disparage 
man,  but  is  ever  ready  to  catch  some  no- 
bility of  the  soul,  some  uprising  of  gener- 
osity, however  fleeting,  as  evidence  that, 
in  the  ebb  and  flow  of  things,  something, 
it  may  be,  after  all,  stands  fast,  and  that 
even  in  this  human  world  that  something 
may  very  credibly  have  its  counterpart,  its 
foundation  and  source  and  consummation 
— its  idea,  to  quote  Plato — in  an  everlasting 
order.  "Those  invincible  prepossessions 
of  humanity  or  of  the  individual,  which 
Bacon  reckoned  'idols  of  the  cave,'  are 
no  offence  to  him  ;  are  direct  informations, 
it  may  be,  beyond  price,  from  a  kindly 
spirit  in  things." 

73 


Walter  Pater 

Pater,  we  repeat,  is  one  of  those  who 
write  for  their  own  sakes.  They  are  called 
by  the  spirit  to  speak.  Men  of  his  spirit- 
ual rank  acknowledge  an  imperious  need 
to  declare  how  things  are  going  on  within 
them.  They  write  in  order  that  they  may 
discover  themselves.  To  straighten  out 
the  things  of  the  spirit,  to  fix  and  name  the 
obscure  movements  of  the  soul  within,  is 
laid  upon  minds  of  a  certain  quality  like  a 
doom,  and  it  is  a  fire  in  their  bones  if  they 
refrain.  It  is  the  one  true  call  to  the  min- 
istry of  God  amongst  one's  fellow-men. 
In  this  matter  Pater  was  of  the  elect. 

In  his  actual  life,  in  Oxford,  in  London, 
he  was  an  elusive  and  impenetrable  figure. 
It  was  doubtless  the  penalty  of  his  very 
delicate  spiritual  organization  that  few, 
even  amongst  his  equals  in  many  matters, 
knew  him  to  any  profitable  degree.  It 
must  have  been  a  difficult  and  unwilling 
business  for  Pater  to  deal  with  men  in  a 
frank  and  unreserved  way.  In  his  books, 
however,  he  has  amply  fulfilled  that  obliga- 
74 


Walter  Pater 

tion,  which  surely  rests  upon  us  all,  to  speak 
with  simplicity  and  kindness  to  those  with 
whom  we  find  ourselves  on  the  long  high- 
way of  our  life.  For  his  books,  strictly 
speaking,  contain  little  besides  his  own 
"sensations  and  ideas."  Even  in  his  writ- 
ings he  shrinks,  as  we  have  said,  from  all 
definiteness,  and  avoids,  by  the  very  habit 
of  his  mind,  anything  like  unqualified  as- 
sertion, employing  the  impersonal  method 
of  parable,  or  story,  or  criticism.  But 
throughout,  it  is  a  veil  which  hides  nothing 
that  it  is  profitable  for  us  to  know.  In 
Pater's  view,  such  reticence  and  self-effacing 
is  but  a  true  man's  modesty  face  to  face 
with  life — with  life  which,  in  its  length  and 
breadth,  and  depth  and  height,  no  one 
presumes  to  know  without  possibility  of 
error. 

In  "  Marius,  the  Epicurean,"  Pater  has, 
I  believe,  confessed  himself  in  the  only  way 
in  which  a  man  of  his  temperament,  of  his 
privacy,  could  make  himself  known.  He 
has  told  a  story.  It  is  the  story  of  a  life 

75 


Walter  Pater 

with  features  which  he  dwells  on  so  know- 
ino-ly,  encountering  circumstances  which 
he  describes  with  such  tenderness  and  in- 
sight, moving  on  to  a  crisis  and  event 
which  he  conceives  with  such  persuasive- 
ness and  grace,  the  whole  living  in  such  an 
air  of  reality  that,  in  dealing  with  such  a 
story,  we  are  dealing,  we  may  believe,  with 
all  that  was  substantial  and  permanent,  in 
Pater's  own  spiritual  career. 

Marius  is  a  young  Roman  of  noble 
family  who  lived  under  the  reign  of  Marcus 
Aurelius.  We  meet  him  first  as  a  boy  in 
his  country  home.  And  there  already, 
Pater  has  the  materials  with  which  no  one 
can  deal  with  a  tenderer  understanding. 
For  with  Pater,  a  boy  is  ever  the  type  of 
the  beautiful,  of  the  comely,  of  the  soul  it- 
self; and  with  him  the  most  precious 
instincts  and  loyalties  which  a  man  may 
take  with  him  into  life  are  just  those  which 
had  their  nourishment  in  the  pieties, 
the  affections,  and  the  secrets  of  home. 
From  the  outset  we  feel  that  Marius  is  no 
76 


Walter  Pater 

ordinary  boy  ;  and  yet  it  may  be  that  he  is 
little  different  from  most  children.  What 
distinguishes  him  from  other  boys  may  be 
that  in  his  case  that  early  sensitiveness, 
that  openness  to  the  unseen,  that  poetry 
and  faith  with  which  all  children  set  out 
upon  life,  were  not  contradicted  or  poisoned 
by  the  careless  brutality  of  older  people. 

The  father  had  died  while  Marius  was 
yet  a  little  child,  so  that  as  a  boy  he  could 
not  recall  what  his  father  had  been  like. 
But  he  often  thought  about  his  father, 
vaguely  and  not  always  happily,  not  know- 
ing anything  surely.  Marius,  as  was  nat- 
ural, grew  up  in  a  peculiarly  dear  and 
intimate  friendship  with  his  mother,  the 
very  absence  of  a  father  making  itself  felt 
in  a  certain  seriousness  and  wisdom,  which 
gave  to  their  relationship  something  of  the 
sentiment  of  religion.  "Marius,  even  thus 
early,  came  to  think  of  women's  tears,  of 
women's  hands  to  lay  one  to  rest  in  death 
as  in  the  sleep  of  childhood,  as  a  sort  of 
natural  want." 

77 


Walter  Pater 

From  his  earliest  days,  as  Marius  could 
recall  when  he  had  left  those  days  far  be- 
hind, he  loved  the  simple  ways  of  the 
country,  its  casual  sounds,  its  quiet  and 
even  manners.  From  the  first,  he  was  ac- 
quainted with  those  elementary  conditions 
of  life — seed-time  and  harvest,  the  morning 
and  the  evening-,  the  labourers  in  the  field, 
the  sheep  and  cattle  out  at  pasture  or  in 
the  fold — those  elementary  conditions,  a 
reverence  for  which  was  a  great  part  of 
primitive  religion. 

There  were  signs,  too,  even  in  those 
earliest  days,  of  a  profound  sympathy  for 
the  sufferings  of  others,  especially  of  the 
dumb  creatures.  And  this  laid  the  basis, 
or  was  itself  an  early  sign,  of  a  view  of  life 
which  was  always  present  to  him,  namely, 
that  pain  was  in  some  way  an  integral  part 
ami'' constituent  of  the  world,  and  that 
true  goodness  consisted  largely  of  tender 
thoughts  and  tender  actions  towards  the 
afflicted. 

It  was  in  deference  to  this  feeling  of 
78 


Walter  Pater 

humanity  towards  dumb  creatures  that  as 
a  boy  he  destroyed  the  snares  with  which 
he  was  wont  to  entrap  the  wild  birds.  "A 
white  bird,"  his  mother  once  told  him  look- 
ing at  him  gravely,  "a  bird  which  he  must 
carry  in  his  bosom  across  a  crowded  pub- 
lic place — his  own  soul  was  like  that." 

As  being  the  head  of  the  household,  it 
fell  to  him,  though  still  a  boy,  to  perform 
the  religious  rites  of  the  home  ;  and  this  he 
did,  always  with  a  natural  and  unaffected 
seriousness,  understanding,  as  it  seemed, 
their  inner  meaning.  Indeed,  partly,  doubt- 
less by  virtue  of  a  grace  with  which  he  was 
born,  partly  also  as  the  effect  for  him  of 
the  quietness  and  seclusion  of  his  early 
surroundings,  Marius  took  with  him  into 
life  a  bias  and  predisposition  towards  the 
religious  view.  "  He  was  apt  to  be  happy 
in  sacred  places,"  he  said  of  himself. 
Whatever  was  ancient,  whatever  had  taken 
part  with  man  in  his  long  wrestling  with 
the  mystery  of  things  and  with  his  own  ex- 
perience, had  the  power  at  once  of  touch- 

79 


Walter  Pater 

ing  Marius,  of  letting  loose  within  him  the 
fountain  of  pity  and  brotherhood. 

"  In  the  sudden  tremor  of  an  aged  voice, 
the  handling  of  a  forgotten  toy,  a  childish 
drawing,  in  the  tacit  observance  of  a  day, 
he  became  aware  suddenly  of  the  great 
stream  of  human  tears  falling  always 
through  the  shadows  of  the  world."  Such 
was  Marius,  at  the  close  of  his  boyhood,  and 
before  he  had  left,  even  for  a  short  season, 
the  shelter  of  his  mother's  nearness. 

From  this  point  events  followed  quickly, 
and  of  a  kind  that  could  not  but  accentuate 
and  confirm  the  habits  and  preferences  of 
which  he  had  already  given  signs.  He  fell 
into  an  illness  which  necessitated  his  leav- 
ing home  for  a  time.  Perhaps  it  was  dur- 
ing this  illness  of  his  and  in  consequence 
of  it  that  he  fell  into  the  way  of  communing 
with  himself,  of  making  plain  to  himself 
how  things  were  affecting  his  outlook  upon 
life  in  general ;  of  realizing  to  his  own 
mind  such  difficulties  and  things  hard  to 
understand  as  arose  out  of  the  events  of 
80 


Walter  Pater 

his  life  ;  of  meeting  quite  candidly  and  of 
dealing  with,  as  satisfactorily  as  he  was 
able  at  each  stage,  those  doubts  and 
troubles  of  the  mind,  which  from  to  time 
invaded  his  equanimity  and  threatened 
such  faith  as  he  possessed. 

Brought  into  contact  thus  young  with 
pain,  and  with  the  prospect,  it  might  be, 
however  remote,  of  death,  Marius,  to  whom 
it  was  always  a  necessity  to  be  honest  with 
himself,  was  compelled  to  come  to  his  own 
conclusion  about  life  as  it  presented  itself 
to  him. 

Shortly  after  his  return  home  his  mother 
died.  Pater  does  not  dwell  upon  her  death 
or  much  upon  the  boy's  feeling — that  would 
have  been  too  violent  for  his  art.  No 
modern  writer  knows  more  sympathetically 
than  does  Pater  the  immense  sufferings  of 
which  children  are  capable,  children  at  least 
from  whom  anything  fine  is  to  be  looked 
for  later  on  in  the  way  of  feeling.  But  he 
knows  also  that  there  is  that  within  a  boy 
— his  very  capital  and  resource  of  life — 
6  81 


Walter  Pater 

which  leads  him  after  a  time  away  from 
events  on  which  it  is  not  good  or  safe  for 
him  that  he  should  dwell  long. 

As  for  Marius,  the  image  of  his  mother 
never  left  his  heart.  In  the  very  cast  of 
his  mind,  in  the  demand  which  he  made 
upon  every  faith  which  offered  itself  to 
him — that  it  should  leave  room  for  the  play 
of  tenderness,  that  it  should  be  the  conse- 
cration of  what  he  himself  had  experienced 
as  the  dearest  of  our  earthly  relationships 
— in  these  ways  he  manifested  his  loyalty 
to  her  who  bore  him,  who  also  by  the 
gradual  ministry  of  affection  had  prepared 
his  heart  for  every  high  claim  that  might 
yet  appeal  to  it.  All  through  his  spiritual 
history,  as  he  himself  came  to  see  only 
towards  the  end  of  his  life,  faith  for  him 
always  had  in  it  a  certain  home-sickness, 
a  certain  yearning  for  a  place  made  sacred 
by  memories  and  a  beloved  presence,  from 
which  to  set  out  in  the  morning,  proposing 
to  oneself  high  things,  to  which  to  return 
sure  of  a  welcome,  sure  of  refreshment 
82 


Walter  Pater 

and  clean  rest,  as  it  were  in  the  evening, 
after  a  journey.  To  Marius,  the  faith  of 
a  man  could  not  be  more  highly  conceived 
than  as  the  early  ties  of  home  and  kin- 
dred, confirmed  and  purified,  that  which 
was  natural  made  spiritual  by  the  stress 
of  our  later  life,  by  the  separations  which 
only  discover  to  us  how  much  we  are  to 
one  another.  It  was  out  of  a  tempera- 
ment of  this  kind,  attuned  by  the  affec- 
tions of  those  first  days,  that  later  on  he 
could  say  that  "in  our  close  clinging  one 
to  another  he  seemed  to  touch  the  Eter- 
nal." Marius  could  never  have  been  finally 
satisfied  with  any  faith  which  denied  that 
there  is,  and  this  because  there  must  be, 
a  heart  of  tenderness  like  the  heart  of  a 
mother,  behind  a  veil. 

At  school,  to  which  soon  after  his 
mother's  death  he  went,  he  was  from  the 
first  attracted  to  a  youth  named  Flavian, 
somewhat  older  than  himself.  The  two 
became  close  friends,  though  Marius  was 
conscious  of  something  in  the  tempera- 

83 


Walter  Pater 

ment  of  Flavian  and  in  the  range  and  kind 
of  his  motives  which  would  always  keep 
them  at  a  certain  distance  from  each  other. 
Flavian  was  one  of  those  of  whom  we 
say,  that  "they  are  bound  to  succeed." 
With  him  intellectual  difficulties,  however 
much  he  might  acknowledge  them,  would 
never  be  permitted  to  interfere  with  that 
worldly  success  which  was  the  main  busi- 
ness. Even  at  the  age  when  Marrus  met 
him  he  would  often  speak  with  zest  of 
what  he  would  do,  and  what  place  he 
would  strive  for  in  the  jostling  world  of 
men.  But  the  two  were  much  together. 
Together  they  read  "The  Golden  Book  of 
Apuleius,"  including  the  pathetic  tale,  full 
of  a  warm  and  exciting  symbolism,  of 
Cupid  and  Psyche.  It  was  a  memorable 
experience  for  Marius,  giving  him  as  it 
did  his  first  glimpse  into  that  glorious  but 
hazardous  world  of  sentiment  which  we 
associate  honorably  with  sex.  It  brought 
over  him  a  tremor,  at  least,  of  that  con- 
vulsion which  was  to  shake  Dante  at  the 
84 


Walter  Pater 

age  of  nine.  As  Pater  says,  "  a  book,  like 
a  person,  has  its  fortunes  with  one;  is 
lucky  or  unlucky  in  the  precise  moment  of 
its  falling  in  our  way,  and  often  by  some 
happy  accident  counts  with  us  for  some- 
thing more  than  its  independent  value." 
The  reading  of  "The  Golden  Book  of 
Apuleius "  was  the  touch  that  alone  was 
needful  to  quicken  into  life  certain  gener- 
ous elements  of  his  nature  which  forever 
afterwards  would  claim  their  due  in  any 
theory  of  things,  in  any  faith  which  he  might 
adopt. 

Another  event  happening  about  this 
time  made  its  sombre  addition  to  Marius' 
burden  of  human  and  inevitable  experi- 
ences. Flavian  was  stricken  by  the  plague, 
which  about  this  time  began  to  devastate 
Rome  and  the  neighboring  country,  a 
plague  the  seeds  of  which  it  is  commonly 
believed  the  Roman  Campagna  retains  to 
this  day.  After  a  short,  fierce  illness  the 
bright  youth  died.  Marius  had  tended 
him  like  a  mother,  noting  the  pathetic 
85 


Walter  Pater 

changes  in  the  patient's  countenance  as 
death  urged  home  its  ruthless  assault.  On 
the  last  night,  Marius  lay  as  usual  in  the 
bed  beside  him,  to  be  near  him  if  he  should 
seem  to  need  anything.  "Is  it  a  com- 
fort," he  whispered  to  the  dying  lad,  "  that 
I  shall  often  come  and  weep  over  you?" 
"  Not  unless  I  be  aware,"  he  faltered, 
"and  hear  you  weeping  !" 

The  death  of  Flavian  had  the  effect  of 
sending  Marius  back  into  the  solitude  of 
his  own  mind.  He  was  conscious  for  a 
time  of  nothing  but  a  profound  anger 
against  nature — an  indignation  against 
things  as  they  are — the  blindness  of  them, 
and  terrible  unconcern.  But  this  death — 
and  this  is  often  the  virtue  of  an  added 
sorrow — had  that  influence  upon  him  which 
real  suffering  never  failed  to  produce;  it 
let  loose  within  him  a  great  wave  of  pity 
for  his  fellow-men,  considering  afresh  the 
burdens  which  they  were  doomed  to  bear, 
by  the  help  of  such  dim  lights. 

If  there  was  anything  in  Marius  at  this 
86 


Walter  Pater 

stage  which  we  might  call  faith,  the  death 
of  Flavian  served  for  a  time  to  eclipse  it, 
leaving  him  in  darkness.  That  death,  with 
all  its  accompaniments,  as  he  now  recalled 
them,  seemed  to  mean  only  one  thing,  that 
the  soul  of  Flavian  had  at  that  moment 
been  extinguished. 

It  is  the  great  merit  of  Pater's  "  Marius," 
and  a  thing  which  will  secure  for  this  book 
a  permanent  place  in  the  confessional  liter- 
ature of  the  soul,  that  it  always  conceives 
faith  as  the  reaction  which  a  man  makes 
against  the  incidents,  the  events  of  his  life, 
as  they  variously  come  home  to  him. 

Faith  in  "Marius"  is  perhaps  best  de- 
scribed as  a  man's  reconciliation  with  him- 
self and  with  the  world  in  which  he  finds 
himself. 

Marius  was  too  good  a  Stoic  and  too 
much  of  a  man  to  permit  even  such  a  fact 
as  death — though  it  were  to  be  established 
as  a  final  and  unrelieved  fact — to  paralyse 
that  vitality  of  youth  which  was  equally  a 
fact,  and  having  the  claims  of  a  fact. 

87 


Walter  Pater 

He  found  a  measure  ol  relief  in  a 
method  of  treating  himself  which  amounted 
to  this  :  he  compelled  himself  to  look  away 
from  all  the  paralysing  and  disheartening 
things.  He  resolved  to  limit  himself  to 
the  things  that  were  actually  before  him, 
refusing  meanwhile  to  raise  any  ultimate 
questions.  There  were  many  good  things 
in  life  even  for  a  soul  like  his.  He  deter- 
mined that  he  would  excel.  He  would 
furnish  his  mind,  making  it,  as  it  were,  a 
beautiful  and  comely  abode.  It  might  be 
that  this  present  life,  brief  as  it  was,  was 
all.  Still,  even  so,  there  was  no  need  that 
he  should  adopt  the  baser  conclusion,  say- 
ing, "All  is  vanity,  therefore  let  me  eat 
and  drink,  for  to-morrow  I  die."  Rather, 
suppose  that  for  him  there  were  no  to- 
morrow, death  ending  all,  still  it  was  not 
in  the  power  of  circumstances  to  rob  him 
of  his  inner  dignity  and  erectness.  He 
would  "adorn  and  beautify  his  soul." 

I   must   deny   myself   the   digressions 
which  are  inviting  me  at  every  step,  turning 
88 


Walter  Pater 

aside  here  for  one  moment  only  to  observe 
how  every  great  work  in  literature,  which 
has  dealt  at  first  hand  with  the  human  soul, 
has  described  this  stage  in  a  true  man's 
recovery  from  the  overthrow  of  his  life 
after  the  first  harmony  has  been  broken  by 
mortal  sin,  it  may  be,  or  by  the  spirit  of 
questioning.  To  this  place  also  Carlyle 
had  come  when  standing,  as  it  seemed  to 
him,  in  a  shivered  world,  he  yet  had  the 
health  to  see  that  a  man  never  was  without 
a  duty,  a  thing  which  required  him  to  act 
immediately ;  that  even  in  a  shivered  uni- 
verse it  was  open  to  a  man  to  "build  up 
a  universe  within  his  own  soul."  To  this 
stage  also  Faust  came  when  he  thought  to 
restore  the  soundness  of  his  disordered 
mind  by  a  determined  occupation  of  him- 
self with  the  beauty  of  Greece. 

And  this  is  the  very  spot  in  the  world 
of  the  soul  whereon  Dante  stood  when  he 
awoke  in  the  dark  forest,  and  seeing  above 
him  a  hill  with  the  sun  shining  on  its  slopes, 
essayed  to  climb  it,  and  failed. 
89 


Walter  Pater 

In  course  of  time  Marius  went  to  Rome 
to  take  his  place  as  amanuensis  to  the 
Emperor  Marcus  Aurelius.  On  the  way 
he  encountered  casually  one  who  was  des- 
tined to  wield  a  quite  immeasurable  influ- 
ence upon  him.  He  met  Cornelius,  a 
young  noble,  a  soldier  of  the  Twelfth 
Legion. 

Pater,  on  behalf  of  Marius,  taxes  his 
copious  insight  in  describing  to  us  the  pe- 
culiar quality  which  was  manifest  in  Cor- 
nelius, the  atmosphere  which  clung  to  him, 
that  grace  of  his  which  wrought  so  power- 
fully upon  his  hero. 

In  a  word,  Cornelius  was  a  Christian,  a 
Christian  of  the  chaste  and  virgin  days, 
when  persecution  purged  the  Church,  suf- 
fering only  those  who  were  saints  indeed 
to  bear  the  sacred  name, 

"  Some  inward  standard  Marius  seemed 
to  detect  in  Cornelius  there  (though  wholly 
unable  to  estimate  its  nature),  of  distinc- 
tion, selection,  refusal,  amid  the  various 
elements  of  the  fervid  and  corrupt  life 
90 


Walter  Pater 

across  which  they  were  moving  together; 
some  secret,  constraining  motive,  ever  on 
the  alert  at  eye  and  ear,  which  carried  him 
through  Rome  as  under  a  charm,  so  that 
Marius  could  not  but  think  of  that  figure 
of  the  white-bird  in  the  market  place  as 
made  true  of  him."  (You  see  there  the 
hint  of  his  mother's  face.) 

Again,  "with  all  the  severity  of  Corne- 
lius, there  was  (at  the  same  time)  a  breeze 
of  hopefulness — freshness  and  hopefulness 
— as  of  new  morning  about  him."  It  was 
evident  to  Marius,  further,  that  everything 
about  Cornelius  "seemed  to  be  but  sign 
or  symbol  of  some  other  thing  far  beyond 
it."  He  seemed  to  live  recognising  "a 
light  upon  his  way  which  had  certainly  not 
yet  sprung  up  for  Marius."  The  most 
delicate  and  suggestive  feature  in  Pater's 
description  of  Cornelius  is  that  Marius  ob- 
served that  he  was  "constantly  singing  to 
himself."  This  singing  was  never  loud  or 
uncontrolled.  It  was  to  Marius  quite  a 
new  kind  of  singing.  It  was  rather  the 


Walter  Pater 

gentle  overflow  of  some  quiet  and  gener- 
ous emotion.  He  would  begin  to  sing  as 
though  at  the  moment  he  were  remembering 
some  private  reason  for  being  happy,  not 
that  he  ever  really  forgot  it. 

In  everything  that  Pater  says  about 
Rome — in  the  circumstances  which  he  se- 
lects, in  the  events  which  he  accentuates, 
above  all,  in  the  background  against  which 
the  figures  move,  a  background  of  luxury 
and  grossness  in  high  places,  of  frivolity 
and  the  lust  for  bloody  spectacles  on  the 
part  of  the  masses  of  the  people,  groups 
here  and  there  of  rhetoricians  and  sophists, 
idlers  and  loafers  in  the  spiritual  world  all 
of  them,  who  used  words  never  as  the  basis 
of  personal  action,  but  merely  as  playthings 
to  illustrate  their  own  dexterity  and  to  fill 
the  empty  hours  ;  an  age  which  believed 
nothing,  in  which  the  best  wisdom  recom- 
mended people  to  take  up  the  attitude  of 
apathy,  the  attitude  of  half-amused,  half- 
contemptuous  spectators,  not  to  expect 
very  much  of  mankind,  just  as  you  do  not 
92 


Walter  Pater 

expect  fruit-trees  to  be  other  than  they  are ; 
and  through  all  this  and  behind  it,  haunting 
everything,  giving  to  everything  a  certain 
exaggeration  (behind  everything),  the  ter- 
rible plague  dealing  death  swiftly — in  all 
this,  I  say,  Pater  means  us  to  understand, 
that  his  Marius,  on  entering  Rome,  came 
into  contact  with  that  mingled  and  dubious 
life  which  a  youth  of  his  mind  and  temper- 
ament encounters  now  when  he  meets  for 
the  first  time  the  forces  and  currents  of  our 
present-day  world. 

On  the  night  he  entered  Rome,  at  dusk, 
Marius  heard  a  call  out  in  the  streets — a 
call,  as  it  was  put,  "to  play."  "Donee 
virenti  canities  abest,"  a  voice  sang — "to 
those  in  whom  their  life  is  still  green."  At 
that  moment  Marius  remembered  Corne- 
lius, bethought  himself  how  Cornelius 
would  have  taken  a  call  like  that.  Per- 
haps it  was  the  first  victory  of  the  living  and 
permanent  Christ  over  the  mind  of  Marius ! 

His  life  in  Rome  was  one  long  disillu- 
sionment. He  had  gone  there  to  fill  a 

93 


Walter  Pater 

post  near  to  the  person  of  the  philosophic 
Emperor.  He  had  gone  full  of  the  wor- 
thiest anticipations.  But  he  learned  how 
life  puts  to  the  test  principles  which  seem 
invincible  in  books.  He  learned  how  there 
is  that  in  man,  and  infecting  society,  work- 
ing its  way  on  all  sides  towards  ruin  and 
catastrophe,  a  something  which  will  not  be 
harnessed,  or  scotched,  or  eradicated  by 
mere  philosophy,  still  less  by  a  philosophy 
which  amounted  to  nothing  but  a  studied 
blindness  towards  all  disturbing  things,  a 
confession  that  all  was  lost  indeed,  but  that 
we  might  harden  our  hearts  at  least  and 
say  nothing  about  it.  He  learned,  though 
obscurely  and  scarcely  putting  it  to  him- 
self so  definitely,  that  we  wrestle  with  a 
spirit,  a  Prince  of  Darkness ;  and  Marius 
separated  himself  from  the  Emperor  and 
the  moralists  just  at  that  point. 

They  seemed  to  him  to  acquiesce  in 

the  evil  and  brutality  which  were  rampant, 

though  these  on  their  own  principles  were 

unworthy  of  man.     Aurelius  was  able  to 

94 


Walter  Pater 

look  on,  apparently  without  active  disgust, 
at  the  bloodshed  of  the  amphitheatre.  He 
could  make  it  consistent  with  himself  to 
decree  human  sacrifices.  And  in  these 
matters  Marius,  by  virtue  of  his  own  purer 
instincts,  reinforced  as  they  now  were  by 
the  gracious  personality  of  Cornelius,  felt 
"that  Aurelius  was  his  inferior  now  and 
forever  on  the  question  of  righteousness." 
"Surely,"  he  said,  "evil  is  a  real  thing, 
and  the  wise  man  wanting  in  the  sense  of 
it,  where  not  to  have  been  by  instinctive 
election  on  the  right  side  is  to  have  failed 
in  life." 

It  was  not  only  when  he  allowed  his 
mind  to  dwell  upon  the  bloodshed  and  in- 
humanity of  the  amphitheater  that  Marius 
became  aware  of  a  profound  separateness 
between  himself  and  those  who — with  the 
Emperor — were  prepared  to  encourage,  or 
at  least  not  to  forbid,  such  spectacles.  In  the 
greater  part  of  the  entire  work  Pater  is 
engaged  in  showing  how  two  processes 
were  going  on  beneath  the  surface  in  the 

95 


Walter  Pater 

soul  of  Marius — two  processes,  perhaps 
really  one  process,  tending  certainly  to  one 
result.  It  had  been  demonstrated  to  him 
in  many  a  notable  incident  which  he  could 
recall,  and  it  was  being  demonstrated  to 
him  daily  in  the  loose,  unreal,  immoral,  and 
despairing  atmosphere  of  both  private  and 
public  life,  that  even  the  boasted  philoso- 
phy of  Marcus  Aurelius  was  but  a  branch 
of  literature,  a  thing  of  words  and  phrases, 
without  passion,  or  power,  or  purpose, 
because  without  any  confidence  in  itself. 
It  could  accomplish  nothing,  face  to  face 
with  the  potent,  and — for  it — the  inerad- 
icable impulses  and  weaknesses  of  man. 
Nay,  in  the  presence  of  Marius,  admitted 
as  he  was  to  the  home-life  of  the  Emperor, 
and  able  to  see  him  when  he  was  off  his 
guard,  many  a  thing  had  happened  which 
had  but  one  meaning — that  the  Emperor 
was  a  most  unhappy  man,  who  only  with  a 
tragical  suppression  of  his  true  feelings  suc- 
ceeded in  keeping  up  a  brave  front  before 
the  world.  Compelled  by  his  experience 
96 


Walter  Pater 

to  lower  one  light  after  another,  the  Em- 
peror seemed  to  be  moving  toward  a  view 
of  life  which  left  no  room  for  hope,  for  the 
expansion  of  the  human  heart.  He  had 
lately  uttered  sentiments  which  could  only 
mean  that  in  certain  circumstances  it  might 
be  justifiable  for  one  who  could  bear  the 
strain  no  more  to  lay  violent  hands  upon 
himself.  "  'Tis  part  of  the  business  of  life," 
he  had  written,  "  to  lose  it  handsomely." 
"  On  due  occasion  one  might  give  life  the 
slip."  And  Marius  could  not  help  con- 
trasting this  wearied  air  which  hung  about 
the  court  and  about  society  with  the  blithe- 
ness  as  of  the  fresh  morning  which  he 
never  failed  to  feel  like  a  breeze  from  the 
face  of  his  one  Christian  friend,  Cornelius. 
About  this  time,  too,  Marius  witnessed 
something  which  was  not  meant  for  his 
eyes,  but  which  he  could  not  do  otherwise 
than  see.  One  of  the  young  princes  who 
was  very  dear  to  his  father  was  pronounced 
to  be  dying;  and  Marius  "saw  the  Em- 
peror carry  the  child  away,  pressed  close 

7  97 


Walter  Pater 

to  his  bosom,  as  if  he  yearned  just  then  for 
one  thing  only,  to  be  united,  to  be  abso- 
lutely one  with  it,  in  its  obscure  distress." 

All  this  was  part  of  a  process  which 
was  going  on  within  the  mind  of  Marius. 
He  was  discovering  new  evidence  each 
day  that  the  best  thought  of  his  time,  so 
far  as  it  had  become  articulate,  failed,  ab- 
solutely and  tragically,  to  account  for,  or 
to  give  energy  to  men  to  deal  with,  the 
facts — the  sins  and  sufferings  of  our  life. 
And  parallel  to  this  movement,  hurrying  it 
to  its  conclusion,  was  that  other,  which  had 
begun  within  Marius  at  the  moment  when 
Cornelius  crossed  his  path. 

For  the  peculiar  grace  which  he  ac- 
knowledged that  he  found  nowhere  except 
in  Cornelius  began  now  to  identify  itself 
somehow  with  everything  that  had  really 
been  beautiful  and  satisfying  in  his  past 
experience. 

The  image  of  Cornelius  began  to  be  a 
center   round   which  gathered  everything 
that  had  ever  appealed  to  him  in  a  tender 
98 


Walter  Pater 

way.  It  seemed  to  him,  for  example,  as 
though  the  grace  of  his  departed  mother, 
now  become  more  powerful  that  life,  had 
set  him  so  much  apart,  was  of  the  same 
kind  as  the  influence  which  he  acknowl- 
edged in  Cornelius.  He  had  the  feeling 
that  his  mother  had  always  intended — quite 
unconsciously,  of  course — those  very  things 
which  Cornelius  stood  for. 

Certainly  life  had  discovered  to  Marius 
a  void  place,  and  it  required  something 
like  an  effort  on  his  part — an  effort  which 
he  could  probably  not  have  justified  to 
himself — to  keep  him  from  yielding  himself 
up  to  Cornelius,  asking  him  plainly  for  his 
so  precious  secret. 

Both  of  these  movements  that  were  go- 
ing on  within  him,  of  disintegration  on  the 
one  hand,  and  of  reconciliation  on  the 
other,  received  about  this  time  what  to  his 
sensitive  and  religious  mind  seemed  to 
have  the  highest  sanction.  For  one  night 
"the  last  bequest  of  a  serene  sleep  had 
been  a  dream  in  which,  as  once  before  he 

99 


Walter  Pater 

heard  those  he  loved  best,  pronouncing  his 
name  very  pleasantly  as  they  passed 
through  the  rich  light  and  shadow  of  a 
summer  morning,  along  the  pavement  of  a 
city — ah,  fairer  far  than  Rome."  It  was 
at  this  stage,  too,  that  Marius  one  day  sud- 
denly asked  himself  this  question.  Since 
life  faced  candidly  and  honourably  dis- 
covers to  us  that  there  are  certain  beliefs, 
presuppositions,  principles,  which  we  men, 
being  such  as  we  are,  and  placed  as  we 
are,  simply  cannot  do  without,  may  it  not 
be  that  the  fact  itself  that  we  cannot  do 
without  them  is  sufficient  evidence  that 
they  are  true  ? 

Thus  was  Marius  coming  gradually,  by 
the  way  of  imagination  and  by  the  help  of 
a  certain  tenderness  in  his  very  reasonings, 
to  a  willingness  to  believe  in  Him  whom 
Christians  worship  as  the  father  of  men. 

But  I  must  hasten  to  conclude :  and  this 

we  now  may,  without  injury  to  the  whole 

spirit  of  Pater's  work.     For  it  would  be 

more   than    Pater    intended    were    we   to 

100 


Walter  Pater 

speak  with  greater  definiteness  of  what 
befell  Marius  in  the  region  of  his  beliefs, 
It  is  never  Pater's  way  to  speak  out;  he 
will  only  hint  or  give  a  cue.  Nevertheless, 
Marius  did  take  some  further  steps  towards 
the  peaceful  healing  of  his  long  divided 
mind. 

One  evening,  as  it  was  drawing  to 
dusk,  Marius  and  Cornelius,  on  their  way 
into  Rome,  halted  at  a  door  which  Cor- 
nelius seemed  to  know.  He  knocked  and 
they  were  admitted.  It  was  the  home  of 
Cecelia,  a  young  Roman  lady  of  noble 
family,  who  had  been  left  a  widow  by 
Cecelius — a  confessor  and  saint.  She  was 
a  Christian.  As  Cornelius  stood  at  the 
open  door  he  looked  at  his  companion  for 
a  moment,  as  though  to  say :  "There  is  still 
time  for  you  to  refuse  to  enter.  There  is 
still  time  for  you  to  go  on,  on  your  usual 
way.  For,  if  you  enter,  if  you  come  within 
the  influence  of  this  home,  you  will  never 
be  able,  and  you  will  never  desire  to  break 
away  from  its  spirit  and  from  its  faith." 
101 


Walter  Pater 

And  Marius  crossed  the  threshold, 
knowing  dimly,  but  quite  unmistakably, 
that  he  had  in  some  way  closed  a  door  be- 
hind him,  and  had  now  committed  himself 
beyond  recall  for  ever  to  that  view  of  things 
which  had  been  appealing  to  him  for  so 
long. 

I  shall  not  attempt  to  describe  this 
sweet  and  holy  home.  If  there  is  even  one 
such  home  remaining  in  the  world  to-day, 
all  is  well,  and  the  wild  and  homeless  heart 
of  man  will  not  be  able  to  resist  its  plea 
for  ever. 

Here  again,  the  first  sound  that  fell 
upon  his  ears  was  the  sound  of  children 
singing.  Chaste  women  and  their  children 
— that  was  what  the  home  of  Cecelia  came 
to  stand  for  ever  afterward  in  Marius' 
mind.  To  him  that  home  was  like  a  bride 
adorned  for  her  husband,  its  orderliness 
and  seriousness  like  the  eager  and  happy 
aspect  of  one  who  is  looking  for  the  com- 
ing in  at  any  moment  of  some  exalted  yet 
not  formidable  Guest. 
102 


Walter  Pater 

That  evening,  and  more  than  once  in 
the  days  that  followed,  Marius  had  oppor- 
tunities to  test,  if  he  had  been  so  minded, 
the  spirit  of  this  Christian  home.  But 
there  was  that  in  it  which  set  all  his  ques- 
tionings to  rest.  Here,  if  anywhere,  was 
the  only  proper  life  for  man ;  here  was  the 
final  and  all-including  point  of  view.  In 
contrast  with  the  despair  which  infected  the 
wisest  in  his  day  was  the  radiant  and  habit- 
ual hopefulness  of  these  people.  He  saw 
the  graves  of  their  little  children,  the 
flowers,  the  dainty  loving  signs,  showing 
that  these  people  agreed  with  him  in  re- 
garding even  the  body  with  a  certain  rev- 
erence and  hope.  Death  had  been  often 
here ;  but  it  had  left  no  sting,  no  bitterness. 
It  had  brought  an  added  grace  to  their 
daily  living ;  it  had  only  confirmed  that 
faith  of  theirs  which  seemed  so  full  of  ten- 
derness ;  it  had  only  added  yet  another 
treasure  to  the  great  sum  of  glorious  things 
which  later  on,  and  in  a  better  place,  would 
be  given  them  of  their  father. 
103 


Walter  Pater 

"The  temperate  beauty"  of  this  Chris- 
tian lady  "reminded  Marius  of  the  best 
female  statuary  of  Greece."  In  her  he 
seemed  to  have  encountered  the  type  of 
a  new  and  regenerate  world.  Here  he 
saw  how  the  body  might  be  redeemed,  and 
could  be  redeemed  only  by  the  spirit. 

Here,  likewise,  he  saw  human  industry 
become  sacred  and  mystical — the  daily 
tasks  of  life  done  as  beneath  the  eye  and 
for  the  sake  of  a  dear  Master  who  would 
not  fail  to  note  the  humblest  fidelity.  Here, 
in  Cecilia,  never  seen  by  Marius  except 
with  a  child  in  her  arms  or  walking  by  her 
side,  he  saw  that  new  consecration  of  ma- 
ternity, that  new  hallowing  of  the  simple 
and  elementary  things  of  life  which  was 
then  dawning  upon  the  world  in  the  story 
of  Mary  and  her  Child. 

It  may  have  been  that  Marius  became 
conscious  of  a  new  feeling  toward  Cecilia 
herself,  arising  or  threatening  to  arise  in 
his  own  heart  But  even  were  that  so,  it 
was  another  fine  result  of  the  new  spirit 
104 


Walter  Pater 

which  was  now  dealing  with  him.  For,  if 
it  was  love,  it  was  love  as  he  had  never 
known  it,  as  no  old  poet  had  ever  described 
it.  In  his  case  it  was  a  sentiment  full  of 
reverence,  serious  and  reticent ;  a  love 
which  would  be  satisfied,  not  so  much  by 
attainment  as  by  self-denials  and  suffering. 
It  was  a  love  which  would  make  him  ready, 
which  even  now  had  made  him  ready  to 
endure  to  the  uttermost  for  its  own  sake, 
and  for  the  wealth  which  he  knew  would 
come  to  him  and  overwhelm  the  pain. 

And  soon  Marius  was  called  upon  to 
suffer  for  his  faith,  such  as  it  was.  Perse- 
cution of  a  fierceness  hitherto  unknown 
swept  over  the  Church.  Marius  himself 
heard  one  read  the  letters  from  the  churches 
of  Lyons  and  Vienne,  including  the  story 
of  Blandina,  the  Christian  girl  who  died 
under  the  tortures  of  the  arena,  whispering 
with  her  last  breath,  "I  am  Christ's." 

It  was  in  these  dark  days  that  Marius 
was  stricken  with  the  plague,  with  that 
mysterious  instrument  of  death  which  had 
105 


Walter  Pater 

all  through  his  life  been  so  much  in  his 
thoughts.  Cornelius  was  with  him  at  the 
time,  and  both  were  taken  prisoners  as 
being  Christians.  It  was  known  that  one 
of  the  two  had  not  openly  professed  the 
Christian  faith,  but,  uncertain  as  to  which 
it  was,  the  soldiers  bore  both  away.  That 
night  Marius  bribed  the  guard  to  set  Cor- 
nelius free,  for  he  supposed  that  Cornelius 
loved  Cecilia.  As  for  himself,  the  fever 
heightened  so  that  he  had  to  be  left  behind. 
In  the  pauses  of  his  delirium  he  became 
aware  that  the  simple  people  into  whose 
hands  he  had  come  were  Christians  also. 
He  heard  them  pray  over  him,  accepting 
him  as  being  without  doubt  one  of  their 
faith.  He  felt  the  mystic  bread  between 
his  lips,  and  in  his  weakness  he  did  not  re- 
fuse it.  "Abi,  abi,  anima  Christiana" — 
Depart,  depart,  O  Christian  soul — he  heard 
them  pray;  and  as  for  the  rest,  "in  the 
grey  austere  evening  of  that  day  they  took 
up  his  remains  and  buried  them  secretly 
with  their  accustomed  prayers,  but  with 
1 06 


Walter  Pater 

joy  also,  holding  his  death,  according  to 
their  generous  view  in  this  matter,  to  have 
been  of  the  nature  of  a  martyrdom ;  and 
martyrdom,  as  the  Church  had  always  said, 
was  a  kind  of  sacrament  with  plenary 
grace." 

That  is  Pater's  story  of  "Marius  the 
Epicurean."  It  all  means  many  things ; 
it  means,  indeed,  everything. 

We  might  describe  the  total  influence 
of  the  book  in  Pater's  own  words  elsewhere, 
and  say  that  it  is  the  story  of  how,  at  last, 
"a  man's  sleepless  habit  of  analysis  had 
been  checked  by  the  inexplicable,  the  abso- 
lute ;  how,  amid  his  jealously  guarded  in- 
difference of  soul,  he  had  been  summoned 
to  yield,  and  had  yielded,  to  the  magnetic 
influence  of  another." 

Or,  we  might  say,  quoting  something 
which  came  into  Marius'  mind  even  when 
the  dimness  of  death  was  in  his  eyes, 
namely,  this :  that  in  Jesus  Christ  and  His 
followers,  "there  had  been  a  permanent 
protest  established  in  the  world,  a  plea, 
107 


Walter  Pater 

a  perpetual  afterthought,  which  humanity 
would  ever  henceforth  possess  in  reserve, 
against  any  wholly  mechanical  theory  of 
itself  and  its  conditions." 

For  myself,  I  close  "Marius"  once 
again,  with  two  feelings  in  my  mind,  two 
purposes,  two  standards  by  which  to  judge 
myself  henceforward.  They  are  the  two 
feelings  which  Marius  tells  us  came  quite 
distinctly  to  him  when,  one  Christmas 
morning,  he  was  leaving  the  church  in 
Cecilia's  home,  having  been  present  at 
worship  there.  One  closes  "Marius"  with 
the  feeling,  first,  that  now  since  we  have 
tasted  a  joy  of  this  purity  and  tenderness, 
one  will  always  have,  and  ought  always  to 
have,  a  kind  of  thirst  for  it  again;  and 
second,  one  has  the  feeling,  after  such  an 
experience,  that  it  was  surely  in  order  to 
give  us  such  a  taste  of  what  life  might  be, 
and  to  make  us  capable  of  receiving  it 
(such  draughts  of  Lethe  and  Eunoe),  that 
"  the  Power  who  created  us  sent  us  into  this 
world — notthatwe  should  be  unhappy  in  it." 
108 


Walter  Pater 

Pater  himself  died  suddenly  in  middle 
life ;  in  middle  faith  also,  as  I  think.  At 
the  close  of  a  wistful  and  perplexing  day, 
a  day  which  grew  clearer  for  him,  as  we 
wish  to  believe,  in  its  later  hours,  Pater  fell 
asleep,  like  Dante,  on  sloping  stairs ! 

"And  we  are  left  to  speculate,"  as  he 
wrote  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  "how  one 
who  always  loved  beauty,  and  loved  it  in 
such  precise  forms  .  .  .  looked  forward 
to  the  vague  land,  and  experienced  the 
last  curiosity." 


109 


Leo   Tolstoy 


"The  power  with  which  we  are  convinced  of  anything  is 
full,  complete,  unshakable,  not  when  our  arguments  are  logically 
irrefutable,  nor  when  our  feelings  correspond  with  the  demands 
of  reason,  but  when  man  becomes  convinced  through  experi- 
ence, having  tested  the  opposite,  that  there  is  only  one  way. 
Such  a  power  of  conviction  we  are  given  as  to  there  being  only 
one  life,  the  following  of  the  will  of  God." — Demands  of  Love 
and  Romance. 


Leo   Tolstoy 

ONE  rises  from  a  long  reading  of  "  Tol- 
stoy" with  a  new  understanding  of  what 
the  old  Hebrew  belief  may  have  signified, 
that  whosoever  presumes  to  look  upon  the 
face  of  God  shall  surely  die.  A  merciful 
Providence  (shall  we  say?)  has  taken  pre- 
cautions in  the  case  of  nearly  all  of  us  to  blur 
our  vision,  to  turn  the  last  edge  and  keen- 
ness of  our  sensibilities,  lest  we  should  see 
more  or  feel  more  than  we  could  bear  or 
deal  with.  The  same  Providence,  however, 
which  spares  men  in  the  mass,  endowing 
us  with  a  certain  last  cowardice  by  virtue 
of  which  we  will  not  stand  or  remain  quite 
alone  on  the  dim  and  tragic  headlands  of 
the  spiritual  world,  has  ordained  that  elect 
souls,  here  and  there,  from  time  to  time, 
urged  by  an  invincible  calling,  shall  go  out 
from  us  and  face  that  Infinite  on  our  be- 
8  113 


Leo  Tolstoy 

half.      "Death  worketh  in  them  but  life 
in  us." 

Tolstoy  belongs  by  every  sign  to  this 
priestly  order  of  men,  who  by  their  insight, 
by  their  gift  of  solitary  thinking,  of  moral 
loneliness  and  suffering,  hold  man  to  his 
destiny. 

It  is  not  with  Tolstoy's  message  with 
the  dogmatic  teaching  which  has  come  to 
be  associated  with  his  name,  that  we  pro- 
pose to  engage  ourselves  at  this  time,  but 
with  Tolstoy  from  a  very  definite  and  ex- 
clusive standpoint.  We  propose  to  con- 
sider what  to  myself  is  his  most  precious 
contribution  to  our  own  time,  and  surely 
to  all  time,  namely,  the  story  of  his  spir- 
itual pilgrimage — how  the  first  harmony 
of  life  came  to  be  destroyed  within  him, 
and  how  after  many  a  trial  and  many  a 
defeat  a  new  harmony  was  at  length  es- 
tablished. 

In  its  deepest  principles — in  its  "form," 
as  Plato  would  have  said — Tolstoy's  spir- 
itual story  differs  in  no  way  from  that  of 
114 


Leo  Tolstoy 

Augustine,  or  Dante,  or  Goethe,  or  Car- 
lyle.  It  is  the  story  which  has  its  classical 
setting  in  the  Book  of  Job.  Once  again  we 
watch  a  human  soul  in  which  the  faith  of 
childhood  has  been  assailed  by  thought,  by 
experience,  drifting,  yet  always  with  many 
a  cry  of  protest,  out  into  the  homeless  seas: 
encountering  there,  by  virtue  of  something 
ineradicable  within  itself  and  by  virtue  of 
something  ineradicable  in  the  nature  of 
things,  a  crisis  which  puts  a  limit  to  its 
outward  drifting  and  turns  it  passionately 
homeward. 

Whilst  it  is  quite  true  that  Tolstoy's 
pilgrimage  from  the  first  unity  of  childhood 
back  through  misery  and  a  crisis  to  a  firm 
and  sufficient  harmony  with  himself  and 
with  life  is  in  its  salient  and  permanent  fea- 
tures not  new,  nevertheless,  simply  because 
he  is  also  a  real  and  unaffected  man  who 
has  fought  his  own  battle  with  his  own 
weapons,  his  story  is  altogether  his  own. 
Over  and  above  those  differences  which 
subsist  between  all  human  beings,  so  that 


Leo  Tolstoy 

no  two  men  who  candidly  reveal  themselves 
to  their  fellow  men  ever  say  quite  the  same 
things,  in  the  case  of  Tolstoy  larger  ele- 
ments of  a  distinguishing  kind  have  entered, 
and  have  given  his  testimony,  features  and 
qualities  which  were  not  elsewhere  to  be 
met  with.  There  are,  for  example,  two  sets 
of  circumstances  which,  crossing  each  other 
indeed  and  mingling,  yet  make  separate 
contributions  to  Tolstoy's  life  and  to  his  ex- 
pression of  himself.  For  one  thing  he  has 
lived  his  life  in  Russia ;  and  for  another 
thing,  the  abiding  life  of  Russia,  its  soul, 
its  temperament  lives  in  him.  From  these 
two  separate  considerations,  for  they  are 
separate,  Tolstoy's  personal  history  de- 
rives its  most  impressive  and  singular 
features. 

When  I  say  that  Tolstoy  has  lived  his 
life  in  Russia,  I  mean  by  Russia  not  simply 
a  geographical  name  :  I  mean  that  he,  an 
enlightened  and  almost  over-sensitive  man, 
who,  so  to  speak,  knows  everything,  has 
been  called  upon  to  live  in  the  midst  of  a 
116 


Leo  Tolstoy 

society  which,  by  its  conditions,  presents 
an  unbroken  contradiction  to  all  his  as- 
pirations. The  Russia  of  to-day  cannot 
make  use  of  men  of  Tolstoy's  humanity 
and  daring.  Such  men  cannot  work  out 
in  a  free  and  healthy  political  life  the  glori- 
ous fires  which  are  raging  within  them. 
They  must  in  some  way  smother  those  fires. 
Therefore  it  is  that  of  the  men  in  Russia 
who  have  Tolstoy's  humanity,  some  try  to 
give  up  thinking  about  the  state  of  their 
country ;  some,  after  a  youthful  plunge 
into  revolutions,  become  case-hardened  and 
sink  into  tame  heads  of  households  ;  some 
curse  and  emigrate,  some  commit  suicide, 
some  go  mad.  Despair  has  in  various 
ways  penetrated  all.  Some  take  to  art,  to 
literature,  piano-playing,  so  that  to-day  the 
only  great  novelists,  the  only  great  exec- 
utants are  Slavs.  We  listen  to  their  weird, 
rebellious  music ;  we  read  their  tales,  so 
terrible  in  their  melancholy  ;  but  it  may  be 
hidden  from  us  that  these  men  who  write 
books  and  play  to  preserve  their  self-re- 
117 


Leo  Tolstoy 

spect,  to  claim  in  the  world  a  place  denied 
them  in  their  own  country,  or  to  keep  their 
hearts  from  breaking.  They  write  or  play 
for  the  same  reason  as  the  Pilgrim  Fathers 
had  to  emigrate  in  England's  bad  days. 
In  art,  in  anarchism,  in  suicide  the  humane 
and  enlightened  Russian  emigrates  from  a 
land  which,  nevertheless,  he  loves  with  a 
passion  which  perhaps  we,  who  are  of  a 
cooler  breed,  have  lost  the  power  to  un 
derstand. 

In  one  of  Maxim  Gorki's  stories  the 
hero,  after  a  wild  life,  comes  to  himself. 
For  the  first  time,  and  too  late  for  him,  his 
eyes  open  to  the  general  situation.  He 
sees  his  pathetic  fellowmen,  their  unending 
toils,  the  unrelieved  drab  and  grey,  like  mud, 
of  their  surroundings,  and  the  fire  burns 
within  him,  the  fire  of  indignation  but  of 
hope  also,  if  all  men  will  only  see.  He  be- 
gins a  crusade  against  things  as  they  are, 
appealing  to  men  of  his  own  class,  to  mer- 
chants and  employers  of  labour.  But  he 
feels  that  he  only  irritates  them.  As  he  per- 
118 


Leo  Tolstoy 

sists  they  become  more  openly  hostile,  or 
they  simply  laugh  at  him.  The  last  stage  in 
his  despair  is  reached  when  he  sees  men 
whispering  together  as  though  planning 
something  with  regard  to  him,  and  it  comes 
home  to  him  that  these  men  are  proposing  to 
deal  with  him  as  a  maniac. — that  is,  to  lock 
him  up. 

As  the  utter  hoplessness  of  ever  being 
able  to  do  anything  strikes  him  anew,  the 
poor  man,  mad  in  fact,  lowers  his  head,  and, 
rushing  with  a  wild  cry  down  a  steep 
street,  dashes  out  his  brains  against  a  stone 
wall  at  the  foot  of  it!  In  modern  Russia, 
a  thinking,  unspoiled  man,  who  has  still  the 
warm,  simple  heart  of  the  Russian,  must 
either  knock  his  brains  out  (one  way  or 
another)  or  follow  Tolstoy  and  believe  in 
God. 

The  other  set  of  circumstances  which 
make  Tolstoy  profoundly  different  from  the 
notable  Pilgrims  of  the  Spirit,  whose  names 
have  been  before  us,  is  that  Tolstoy  is  a 
Russian,  that  the  abiding  soul  of  Russia 
119 


Leo  Tolstoy 

labours  and  comes  to  self-consciousness 
in  him.  In  this  country  we  are  at  a  disad- 
vantage when  we  speak  of  the  Russian. 
There  is  a  subtle  but  obstinate  hostility  to 
be  overcome  within  us.  But  such  a  feeling 
is  due  not  to  the  real  Russian,  whom  I  am 
quite  sure  we  should  very  much  love  if  we 
knew  him,  and  considered  him  in  his  almost 
divine  patience.  It  has  been  provoked  by 
what  we  read  in  newspapers  about  the 
sayings  or  doings  of  certain  people  at  the 
top  in  Russia.  But  I  would  not  go  to  those 
at  the  top — to  the  rulers,  to  the  generals, 
to  the  diplomatists — for  my  knowledge  of 
a  people.  They,  through  no  fault  of  their 
own,  are  very  much  alike  in  all  nations. 
No !  I  would  go  to  the  literature  of  the 
people,  especially  would  I  go  to  their  lit- 
erature of  the  soul — the  things  they  say  or 
sing  or  write  when  their  heart  and  flesh  cry 
out.  For  myself,  I  have  little  interest  in 
the  Russia,  which,  according  to  report,  is 
always  engaged  upon  some  sinister  diplo- 
macy. The  Russia  I  care  for  I  find  in 
1 20 


Leo  Tolstoy 

Turgenieff  and  Tolstoy,  in  Merejkowsky, 
in  Siebenkiewickz  and  what  I  find  there 
is  the  great  tender  soul  of  a  man  who  in 
simplicity,  in  directness,  in  his  laughter 
and  tears,  is  still  a  child.  A  virgin-soul  it  is 
still  in  touch  with  primitive  nature,  still  de- 
riving nourishment  for  his  spirit  from  the 
mystery  and  magnitude  of  things;  still 
haunted  by  God,  unable  yet  to  think  of  life 
as  void  of  a  momentous  and  eternal  mean- 
ing. A  child  it  is  indeed,  summoned,  it 
may  be,  too  suddenly  to  the  tasks  of  man- 
hood. Thus  he  stands  puzzled  on  the 
threshold  of  baffling  things,  ready  for  any 
sincere  comradeship.  And  when  some 
hope,  as  is  the  way  with  children,  fails  him, 
he  will  break  something  that  is  near,  or  he 
will  cover  his  face  with  his  hands  and  weep, 
as  though  a  quite  infinite  sorrow  had'  be- 
fallen him.  Tolstoy  belongs  to  this  young 
and  primitive  race,  having  its  directness, 
its  capacity  for  feeling  in  an  extreme  and 
infinite  way  the  moods  that  visit  us,  the 
play  of  lights  and  shadows  as  we  journey 
121 


Leo  Tolstoy 

on.  For  "In  Russia,"  it  has  been  ob- 
served, "life  runs  to  passion,  to  emotion, 
as  in  Greece  it  ran  to  intelligence,  and 
with  ourselves  to  action  or  practical  mat- 
ters." "Every  Russian  who  has  not  been 
demoralized  by  commerce  or  officialism  is 
a  Pilgrim.  He  is  a  foredoomed  Truth- 
seeker."  It  may  well  be  that  Russia  is  des- 
tined to  be  the  Messiah  of  modern  nations, 
alone  fitted  to  baptize  the  Western  world 
anew  into  emotion,  into  simplicity,  into  a 
genuine  communion  with  God.  All  that 
is  in  Tolstoy. 

And  now,  to  proceed  on  our  particular 
task,  which  is  to  define  and  follow  the 
course  of  Tolstoy's  personal  and  interior 
life,  from  the  time  when,  leaving  the  clear 
pool  amongst  the  hills,  it  fell  wildly  and 
painfully  through  dark  and  tortuous  places 
until  nearer  the  sea  it  has  come  to  a  space 
of  fruitful  peace.  It  is  almost  the  whole 
truth  to  say  that  Tolstoy  has  written  about 
nothing  except  his  own  interior  history. 
Everything  with  him  comes  round  to  the 

122 


Leo   Tolstoy 

soul,  and  is  to  be  apprehended  in  terms  ot 
feeling.  He  is  present  in  all  his  works  of 
fiction.  Oleninein  "The  Cossacks,"  Levin 
in  "Anna  Karenina,"  Pierre  and  Andrei 
in  "War  and  Peace,"  Nekhludoff  in  "Res- 
urrection"— they  are  all  of  them  Tolstoy 
in  various  stages  of  his  spiritual  journey, 
Tolstoy  in  various  moods — in  the  twilight 
of  disillusionment,  in  the  night  of  some 
despair,  or  in  the  glorious  morning  when 
he  sings  and  makes  melody  in  his  heart. 
In  addition,  Tolstoy  has  put  upon  record 
in  language  which  has  no  parallel  for  firm- 
ness, directness,  unfaltering  truthfulness, 
the  story  of  his  spiritual  history  as  he 
recalled  it.  He  has  laid  bare  all  his  proc- 
esses ;  he  has  kept  nothing  back ;  the  re- 
sult being  books  which  must  have  the  value 
for  all  time  of  S.  Augustine's  "Confes- 
sions." I  propose  to  make  very  extensive 
quotations  from  these  autobiographies,  in 
fact  to  make  Tolstoy  tell  his  own  story. 
For  one  thing,  no  one  could  tell  it  with 
such  discriminating  language,  with  such 
123 


Leo  Tolstoy 

correspondence  of  words  to  things  of  the 
soul,  as  Tolstoy.  And  it  may  be  that  I  have 
justification  for  using  freely  his  own  record 
of  his  pilgrimage  in  this,  that  I  have  faithfully 
gone  over  all  the  ground  with  Tolstoy,  that 
I  have  made  the  long  detour  of  all  his  char- 
acteristic works,  of  which  his  autobiography 
is  but  the  inner  and  concentric  circle. 

Tolstoy  was  christened  and  educated 
in  the  faifh  of  the  Orthodox  Greek  Church ; 
he  was  taught  it  as  a  child  and  as  a  youth. 
Nevertheless,  at  eighteen  years  of  age, 
when  he  left  the  University  of  Kazan,  he 
had  given  up  all  belief  in  anything  he  had 
ever  been  taught.  He  recalls  how,  when 
he  was  about  twelve,  a  boy  probably  older 
than  himself  informed  him  airily  that  know- 
ing people,  professors,  and  writers  of  books, 
had  made  the  discovery  that  there  was  no 
God.  At  that  time  he  enjoyed  the  jokes 
of  older  people  when  they  ridiculed  his 
brother  for  his  seriousness.  He  read  Vol- 
taire, permitting  the  Frenchman's  mockery 
124 


Leo   Tolstoy 

to  poison  his  first  fresh  sense  of  things. 
The  sum  of  it  all  was  that  at  eighteen,  so 
far  as  the  traditional  faith  was  concerned, 
the  faith  which  he  learned  from  the  cate- 
chism and  the  schoolmaster,  he  had  none. 
He  showed  his  early  interest  in  his  own 
feelings  by  making  the  observation  that 
although  he  had  abandoned  his  hereditary 
faith,  the  absence  of  it  did  not  seem  to 
make  any  difference  to  him;  and  he  went 
on  to  conclude  that  every  other  person  was 
exactly  in  the  same  position  as  he  himself 
was.  He  looked  about  him  and  saw  that 
the  hereditary  faith  which  people  were  sup- 
posed to  hold,  really  and  as  a  matter  of 
fact  had  no  influence  upon  their  lives.  He 
saw  that  there  was  no  difference  between 
people  who  professed  the  national  religion 
and  those  who  did  not,  or  if  there  was  any 
difference  it  was  to  the  credit  of  those  who 
had  frankly  discarded  religion.  He  as- 
sumed, judging  of  others  from  his  own 
case,  that  the  hereditary  religion  meant 
nothing  at  all  to  anybody,  that  it  continued 
125 


Leo  Tolstoy 

to  sit  upon  a  great  many  people  not  be- 
cause they  clung  to  it  or  felt  their  need  of 
it,  but  simply  because  it  had  not  yet  been 
pushed  from  off  them.  A  friend  told  him 
a  story  about  himself  which  seemed  to  cor- 
roborate this  view.  He  told  Tolstoy  how, 
"twenty-six  years  before,  he  was  with  a 
hunting  party,  and  before  he  lay  down  to 
rest  he  knelt  down  to  pray,  according  to  a 
habit  of  his  from  childhood.  His  elder 
brother,  who  was  of  the  party,  lay  on  some 
straw  and  watched  him.  When  the  younger 
had  finished,  and  was  preparing  to  lie  down, 
his  brother  said  to  him :  'Ah,  you  still  keep 
that  up  ?' "  Nothing  more  passed  between 
them,  but  from  that  day  the  younger  man 
ceased  to  pray  and  to  go  to  Church.  For 
nearly  thirty  years  he  has  not  said  a  prayer, 
has  not  taken  the  Communion,  has  not 
been  in  a  church,  not  because  he  shared 
the  convictions  of  his  brother,  not  because 
he  had  come  to  conclusions  of  his  own,  but 
because  his  brother's  words  were  like  the 
push  of  a  finger  against  a  wall  ready  to 
126 


Leo  Tolstoy 

tumble  over  with  its  own  weight;  they 
proved  to  him  that  what  he  had  taken  for 
belief  was  an  empty  form,  and  that  conse- 
quently every  word  he  uttered,  every  sign 
of  the  cross  he  made,  every  time  he  bowed 
his  head  during  his  prayers,  his  act  was  an 
unmeaning  one.  When  he  once  admitted 
to  himself  that  such  acts  had  no  meaning 
in  them,  he  could  not  but  discontinue  them. 
"Thus,"  concludes  Tolstoy,  "it  has  been, 
and  is,  I  believe,  with  the  large  majority 
of  men." 

Tolstoy  entered  upon  his  manhood,  hav- 
ing left  for  ever  behind  him,  as  he  thought, 
the  traditional  religion,  assuming  too  that 
most  of  the  people  round  about  him,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  were  in  the  same  position. 
There  is,  however,  a  wide  gulf  between 
Tolstoy  and  the  average  careless  person. 
He  was  conscious  that  he  had  abandoned 
the  old  faith.  It  was,  as  we  shall  see,  the 
void  left  within  him  by  the  removal  of  the 
old  pieties  and  sanctions  for  life,  which 
became  in  his  case  the  seat,  first  of  his 
127 


Leo  Tolstoy 

spiritual  misery,  and  at  last  the  beginning 
of  his  hope.  He  entered  manhood  free 
from  dogmatic  bondage,  but  at  the  same 
time  with  a  more  or  less  active  belief  in 
God,  or  rather  a  kind  of  feeling  for  God. 
He  joined  the  army,  and  fought  in  the  de- 
fence of  Sevastopol.  There  he  began  to 
write,  and  at  one  became  famous.  Already 
to  discriminating  minds  in  these  first  tales 
from  Sevastopol,  Tolstoy  can  not  hide  the 
outlines  of  his  spirit.  He  can  not  keep 
back  the  cries,  the  yearnings,  the  protests, 
the  shrinkings  which  he  was  afterwards  to 
utter  without  ceasing.  Although  he  had  to 
be  careful  of  the  censor,  already  in  these 
first  sketches  war  becomes  hideous,  insane, 
immoral ;  generals  and  captains  appear  as 
helpless  and  futile  beings  who,  in  the  actual 
stress  of  things,  can  do  nothing  at  all. 
Already,  too,  the  one  figure  who  catches 
Tolstoy's  eye  and  brings  the  sense  of  tears 
into  his  pen,  is  the  figure  of  the  obscure 
and  unregarded  common  soldier,  with  his 
dumb  fidelity  like  a  dog,  with  his  inex- 
128 


Leo  Tolstoy 

haustible  patience.  "I  can  not,"  says  Tol- 
stoy, "now  recall  those  years  without  a 
painful  feeling  of  horror  and  loathing.  I 
put  men  to  death,  I  fought  duels  to  slay 
others,  I  lost  at  cards,  wasted  the  substance 
wrung  from  the  sweat  of  peasants,  rioted, 
and  deceived.  Lying,  robbery,  adultery  of 
all  kinds,  drunkenness,  violence,  murder, 
all  committed  by  me,  not  one  crime  omitted, 
and  yet  I  was  not  the  less  considered  by 
my  equals  a  comparatively  moral  man. 
Such  was  my  life  during  ten  years.  During 
that  time  I  began  to  write,  out  of  vanity, 
love  of  gain,  and  pride.  I  followed  as  a 
writer  the  same  path  which  I  had  chosen 
as  a  man.  In  order  to  obtain  the  fame  and 
the  money  for  which  I  wrote,  I  was  obliged 
to  hide  what  was  good,  and  bow  down 
before  what  was  evil.  How  often  while 
writing  have  I  cudgelled  my  brains  to  con- 
ceal under  the  mask  of  indifference  or 
pleasantry  those  yearnings  for  something 
better  which  formed  the  real  problem  of 
my  life !  I  succeeded  in  my  object  and  was 

9  I29 


Leo  Tolstoy 

praised.  .  .  .  Before  I  had  time  to  look 
around,  the  prejudices  and  views  of  life 
common  to  the  writers  of  the  class  with 
which  I  associated  became  my  own,  and 
completely  put  an  end  to  all  my  former 
struggles  after  a  better  life.  These  views, 
under  the  influence  of  the  dissipation  into 
which  I  plunged,  issued  in  a  theory  of  life 
which  justified  it.  The  view  taken  by  my 
fellow-writers  was  that  life  is  a  develop- 
ment, and  the  principal  part  in  that  devel- 
opment is  played  by  ourselves,  the  thinkers , 
while  among  the  thinkers,  the  chief  influence 
is  again  due  to  ourselves,  the  poets.  Our 
vocation  is  to  teach  mankind.  It  ought 
next  to  have  occurred  to  serious  men  who 
were  engaged  in  teaching  their  fellow-men, 
to  ask  themselves,  'What  is  it  that  we  are 
teaching  £  or,  'Are  we  teaching  anything?' 
or;  'Is  what  we  are  teaching  right?' "  And 
these  questions  did  haunt  Tolstoy  in  a  very 
troublesome  way.  But  he  succeeded  for  a 
time  in  putting  them  aside.  He  was  be- 
coming rich,  he  was  famous,  he  wrote  on 
130 


Leo   Tolstoy 

and  on,  as  did  others.  "We  were  all  then 
convinced  that  it  behoved  us  to  speak,  to 
write,  to  print  as  fast  as  we  could,  as  much 
as  we  could,  and  that  on  this  depended 
the  welfare  of  the  human  race.  Hundreds 
of  us  wrote,  printed,  taught,  and  all  the 
while  confuted  and  abused  each  other. 
Quite  unconscious  that  we  ourselves  knew 
nothing,  that  to  the  simplest  of  all  problems 
in  life — what  is  right  and  what  is  wrong — 
we  had  no  answer,  we  all  went  on  talking 
together,  without  one  to  listen,  at  times 
abetting  and  praising  one  another  on  con- 
dition that  we  were  abetted  and  praised  in 
turn,  and  again  turning  upon  each  other  in 
wrath — in  short,  we  reproduced  the  scenes 
in  a  madhouse." 

To  a  nature  like  Tolstoy's,  once  a 
question  has  been  raised  there  is  no  peace 
until  somehow  it  is  dealt  with  and  composed. 
At  this  stage  his  difficulty,  by  his  own  ac- 
count, was  that  he  had  become  a  leader,  a 
guide,  a  teacher,  while  the  fact  was  he  had 
no  message  to  declare  to  men,  no  light 


Leo  Tolstoy 

upon  life,  no  clue  to  its  mystery.  During 
the  six  years  previous  to  his  marriage  his 
mind  became  so  engaged  with  his  personal 
problem  that  for  a  time  he  withdrew  to  the 
steppes,  to  recover  under  the  healing  influ- 
ences of  nature  his  equanimity.  By  this 
time  he  had  travelled  in  Europe,  taking 
every  opportunity  to  acquaint  himself  with 
the  best  thought  of  his  time.  It  seemed 
to  him  that  he  found  a  foundation  for  his 
life  in  the  ideas  of  progress  and  develop- 
ment which  were  current.  He  was  so 
eager  to  embrace  any  positive  faith  with 
regard  to  the  meaning  of  life,  that  he  tried 
to  put  away  from  himself  some  difficulties 
which  his  quick  mind  detected  in  all  the 
talk  about  progress  as  a  moral  aim  or  mo- 
tive for  man.  He  felt  that  men  who  had, 
on  their  own  confession,  no  confidence  at 
all  in  life,  no  conviction  as  to  the  "whither 
of  all  things,"  were  ill-prepared  to  order 
the  immediate  steps.  The  gospel  of  prog- 
ress seemed  to  him  to  be  nothing  better 
than  a  kind  of  fatalism  with  no  right  or 
132 


Leo   Tolstoy 

qualification  to  answer  the  question  which 
was  gnawing  within  him.  "Tormented  by 
the  question,  'How  was  I  to  better  my 
life?' — when  I  answered  that  I  must  live 
for  progress,  I  was  only  repeating  the  an- 
swer of  a  man  carried  away  in  a  boat  by 
the  waves  and  the  wind,  who,  to  the  one 
important  question  for  him,  *  Where  are 
we  to  steer?'  should  answer,  saying,  'We 
are  being  carried  somewhere.' '  Two 
events  he  records  as  happening  at  this 
time,  the  influence  of  one  and  the  other 
being  to  show  him  the  hollowness  for  the 
individual  of  any  support  for  faith  in  hazy 
notions  of  universal  progress.  While  in 
Paris,  he  saw  a  man  guillotined,  and  on 
his  return  to  Russia  he  was  summoned  to 
the  deathbed  of  a  very  dear  brother.  With 
regard  to  the  incident  in  Paris,  he  tells  us 
that  as  he  saw  the  head  divided  from  the 
body  ...  he  understood,  not  with  his 
reason,  but  with  his  whole  being  (a  favorite 
phrase  of  Tolstoy's),  that  no  theory  of  the 
wisdom  of  all  established  things,  nor  of 

133 


Leo  Tolstoy 

progress,  could  justify  such  an  act ;  and 
that  if  all  the  men  in  the  world  from 
the  day  of  creation,  by  whatever  theory, 
had  found  this  thing  necessary,  it  was  not 
so.  It  was  a  bad  thing.  Therefore  he 
must  judge  of  what  was  right  and  neces- 
sary, not  by  what  men  said  and  did,  not  by 
"progress,"  but  by  what  he  himself  felt  to 
be  true  in  his  own  heart.  As  for  the  effect 
upon  him  of  his  brother's  death,  a  young, 
sincere,  and  able  man,  who  died  without 
ever  having  known  what  his  life  had  been 
given  him  for,  this  was  all  that  was  needed 
to  give  the  terrible  fact  of  death  its  supreme 
place  for  Tolstoy  amongst  the  difficulties 
which  life  raises  in  the  way  of  faith.  As  he 
beheld  his  brother  dying,  he  could  only 
feel  the  irony  under  the  consolations  of 
"progress."  "What  boots  it,"  as  Lotze 
says,  "that  life  on  the  whole  is  well,  if  in 
its  details  it  is  terrible !" 

Hoping,  it  may  be,  to  keep  off  the  in- 
sistence of  his  own  questioning  spirit,  Tol- 
stoy, on  his  return  home,  devoted  himself 
134 


Leo   Tolstoy 

to  teaching.  He  also  accepted  a  magis- 
tracy, and  busied  himself  in  affairs.  But 
the  inner  ferment  never  at  any  time  sub- 
sided, and  at  last,  his  health  threatening 
to  break  down  seriously,  he  betook  himself 
as  we  have  said,  to  the  steppes.  There  he 
enjoyed  a  certain  leisure  from  himself,  and 
wrote  his  charming  story,  "  The  Cossacks." 
Let  me  quote  a  few  lines,  which,  to  discern- 
ing eyes,  will  show  at  least  the  promise  of 
daybreak  in  the  soul  of  Tolstoy.  "The 
hero,  Olenine,  has  gone  out  pheasant  shoot- 
ing alone.  He  lies  down  in  a  thicket  where 
a  deer  had  lain  before  him  and  had  left  the 
imprint  of  his  body  on  the  leaves.  He  is 
suddenly  seized  by  an  unutterable  sensa- 
tion of  happiness,  of  love  for  all  creation. 
The  very  gnats  that  annoyed  him  at  first 
began  to  have  a  claim  upon  him  as  part  of 
the  whole  situation.  He  makes  the  sign 
of  the  cross  and  murmurs  a  prayer.  'Why 
have  I  never  been  happy  ?'  he  asks.  He 
reviews  his  life  and  turns  in  disgust  from 
its  unredeemed  selfishness.  Suddenly  a 

135 


Leo   Tolstoy 

light  breaks  upon  him.  'Happiness,  he 
cried,  '  consists  in  living  for  others ;  that  is 
clear.  Man  aspires  to  happiness  ;  there- 
fore it  is  a  proper  desire.  If  he  tries  to  get 
it  in  a  selfish  way,  in  seeking  wealth,  glory, 
love,  he  may  not  succeed,  and  his  wishes 
remain  unsatisfied.  Then  it  must  be  selfish 
desires  which  are  wrong,  and  not  the  wish 
to  be  happy.  Now,  what  are  the  dreams 
which  may  be  realised  apart  from  our  out- 
ward circumstances?  Only  love  and  self- 
sacrifice!'  He  jumps  up,  rejoicing  in  his 
discovery,  and  seeks  impatiently  for  some 
one  to  love,  to  do  good  to,  to  deny  himself 
for.  And  returning  to  the  village,  he  in- 
sists upon  presenting  his  horse  to  a  young 
Cossack  who  had  been  his  rival  in  the 
affections  of  one  of  the  village  maidens. 
He  loved  every  one  so  much  that  he  felt 
that  his  remote  hamlet  was  his  true  home, 
that  there  was  his  family  and  his  happiness, 
that  nowhere  else  and  never  again  could  he 
be  so  full  of  joy."1 

'Crosley's  "  Message  of  Tolstoy." 
136 


Leo   Tolstoy 

On  his  return  from  the  steppes  he  mar- 
ried the  delightful  "  Kitty"  of  Anna  Kare- 
nina.  For  fifteen  years  the  responsibilities, 
the  joys  of  family  life,  his  bodily  vigour, 
daily  labours,  his  increasing  power  and  fame 
as  a  writer — these  succeeded  in  keeping  at 
least  within  bounds  the  old  question,  the  old 
cry  for  light  upon  this  life  of  ours,  for  faith, 
for  confidence  as  to  life's  meaning.  But  now 
it  returned  to  him  with  redoubled  energy. 
The  question  since  his  brother's  death 
came  now  before  him  rather  than  in  this 
way:  "What  is  that  meaning  of  life  which 
takes  the  sting  and  bitterness  from  death?" 

He  began  to  wander  about  the  fields, 
and  was  a  victim  of  low  spirits.  The 
same  questions  kept  sounding  in  his  ears, 
"Why?"  and  "What  after?"  At  first  it 
seemed  to  him  that  these  were  empty  and 
unmeaning  questions;  that  the  answers 
were  well  known,  and  such  as  he  could 
adopt,  whenever  he  cared  to  take  the 
trouble.  But  they  presented  themselves 
to  his  mind  with  ever-increasing  frequency, 

137 


Leo  Tolstoy 

demanding  an  answer  with  greater  and 
greater  persistence,  grouping  themselves 
into  one  dark  and  ominous  spot.  It  was 
with  him,  he  says,  as  in  every  case  of  a 
hidden,  mortal  disease ;  at  first  the  symp- 
toms are  slight,  and  are  disregarded  by  the 
patient,  but  later  they  are  repeated  more 
and  more  frequently,  till  they  end  in  a 
period  of  uninterrupted  suffering.  The 
sufferings  increase,  and  the  patient,  before 
he  has  time  to  seek  a  remedy,  is  confronted 
with  the  fact  that  what  he  took  for  a  mere 
indisposition  has  become  more  important 
to  him  than  anything  else  on  earth,  that  he 
is  face  to  face  with  death.  He  had  thoughts 
of  taking  his  own  life,  and  for  a  time  would 
not  handle  a  gun  for  fear  of  what  he  might 
do  in  an  access  of  despondency ;  and  yet 
his  mind  was  perfectly  clear.  He  had  a 
loving  and  beloved  wife,  a  happy  home  of 
children,  and  as  for  his  bodily  vigour,  he 
could  keep  up  with  a  peasant  in  mowing. 
He  sums  up  his  condition  in  a  story,  which 
once  heard  can  never  be  forgotten.  "There 
138 


Leo  Tolstoy 

is  an  old  Eastern  fable  about  a  traveller  in 
the  Steppes  who  is  attacked  by  a  furious 
wild  beast.  To  save  himself  the  traveller 
gets  into  a  dried-up  well,  but  at  the  bottom 
of  it  he  sees  a  dragon  with  its  jaws  wide 
open  to  devour  him.  The  unhappy  man 
dares  not  get  out  for  fear  of  the  wild  beast, 
and  dares  not  descend  for  fear  of  the 
dragon,  so  he  catches  hold  of  the  branch 
of  a  wild  plant  growing  in  a  crevice  of  the 
well.  His  arms  grow  tired,  and  he  feels 
that  he  must  soon  perish,  death  waiting 
him  on  either  side,  but  he  still  holds  on ; 
and  then  he  sees  two  mice,  one  black  and 
one  white,  gnawing  through  the  stem  of 
the  wild  plant,  as  they  gradually  and  evenly 
make  their  way  round  it.  The  plant  must 
soon  give  way,  break  off,  and  he  will  fall 
into  the  jaws  of  the  dragon.  The  traveller 
sees  this,  and  knows  that  he  must  inevitably 
perish ;  but,  while  still  hanging,  he  looks 
around  him,  and  finding  some  drops  of 
honey  on  the  leaves  of  the  wild  plant,  he 
stretches  out  his  tongue  and  licks  them." 
139 


Leo   Tolstoy 

"Thus,"  continues  Tolstoy,  "I  cling  to 
the  branch  of  life,  knowing  that  the  dragon 
of  death  inevitably  awaits  me,  ready  to  tear 
me  to  oieces,  and  I  can  not  understand 
why  such  tortures  are  fallen  to  my  lot.  I 
also  strive  to  suck  the  honey  which  once 
comforted  me,  but  it  palls  on  my  palate, 
while  the  white  mouse  and  the  black,  day 
and  night,  gnaw  through  the  branch  to 
which  I  cling.  I  see  the  dragon  too 
plainly,  and  the  honey  is  no  longer  sweet. 
I  see  the  dragon,  from  whom  there  is  no 
escape,  and  the  mice,  and  I  can  not  turn 
my  eyes  away  from  them.  It  is  no  fable, 
but  a  living,  undeniable  truth,  to  be  un- 
derstood of  all  men.  The  former  delusion 
of  happiness  in  life,  which  hid  from  me 
the  horror  of  the  dragon,  no  longer  de- 
ceives me.  However  I  may  reason  with 
myself  that  I  can  not  understand  the 
meaning  of  life,  that  I  must  live  without 
thinking,  I  can  not  again  begin  to  do  so, 
because  I  have  done  so  too  long  already. 
I  can  not  now  help  seeing  that  each  day 
140 


Leo   Tolstoy 

and  each  night  as  it  passes  brings  me 
nearer  to  death." 

Here,  then,  Tolstoy  came  to  a  standstill, 
here  where  all  the  elect  souls  have  stood. 
The  question  could  not  now  be  postponed 
or  evaded.  He  felt  he  could  not  live  with 
self-respect,  with  integrity,  until  the  ques- 
tion had  received  some  final  and  irrevoca- 
ble solution  and  the  question  had  come  to 
be  this :  "Is  there  any  meaning  in  my  life 
which  can  overcome  the  inevitable  death 
awaiting  me?" 

He  searched  the  science  of  our  time, 
its  philosophy,  its  practical  wisdom,  for  a 
solution,  for  an  anodyne  even,  to  this  inner 
torment ;  but  in  each  case  turned  away 
disheartened,  repelled.  Tolstoy  revels  in 
his  contempt  for  science  the  moment  it 
presumes  to  deal  with  what  for  him  were 
the  really  important  things,  namely,  the 
whence,  the  why,  and  the  whither  of  life  ? 

"For  the  practical  side  of  life,  I  used 
to  say  to  myself,  all  its  development  and 
differentiation,  all  tends  to  complication 
141 


Leo   Tolstoy 

and  perfection,  and  there  are  laws  which 
govern  this  process.  You  are  yourself  a 
part  of  the  whole.  Learn  as  much  as  pos- 
sible of  the  whole,  and  learn  the  law  of  its 
development:  you  will  then  know  your 
own  place  in  the  great  unity.  Though  I 
feel  shame  in  confessing  it,  I  must  needs 
own  that  there  was  a  time  when  I  was  my- 
self developing,  when  my  muscles  and 
memory  were  strengthening,  my  power  of 
thinking  and  understanding  on  the  increase ; 
that  I,  feeling  this,  very  naturally  thought 
that  the  law  of  my  own  growth  was  the  law 
of  the  universe,  and  explained  the  meaning 
of  my  own  life.  But  there  came  another 
time  when  I  had  ceased  to  grow,  when  I 
felt  that  I  was  no  longer  developing,  but 
drying  up.  My  muscles  grew  weaker,  my 
teeth  began  to  fall  out ;  and  I  saw  that  this 
law  of  growth  not  only  explained  nothing, 
but  that  such  a  law  did  not  and  could  not 
exist;  that  I  had  taken  for  a  general  law 
what  only  affected  myself  at  a  given  age." 
Again  "the  relation  of  experimental  sci- 
142 


Leo   Tolstoy 

ence  to  the  question  of  the  meaning  of  life, 
may  be  put  as  follows :  Question,  '  Why  do 
I  live?'  Answer,  '  Infinitely  small  particles 
in  infinite  combinations,  in  endless  space 
and  endless  time,  eternally  change  their 
forms  ;  and  when  you  have  learned  the  laws 
of  these  changes,  you  will  know  why  you 
live.' '  In  short,  when  science  presumes  to 
deal  with  causes,  with  the  final  cause,  with 
reality  in  fact,  it  begins  to  talk  nonsense. 

Tolstoy  is  led  to  ask  himself  at  this 
point  how  it  comes  to  pass  that  the  people 
round  about  him  are  not  aware  of  the 
problem  which  is  haunting  him  like  a  night- 
mare ;  and  he  explains  to  himself  why  they 
are  at  ease,  or  seem  to  be.  People  of  his 
own  class,  the  cultured,  the  intellectual, 
save  themselves  from  the  terrible  contra- 
diction between  faith  and  life  as  we  know 
it,  and  take  part  in  it,  in  four  different 
ways.  "  One  way  is  to  ignore  life's  being 
a  meaningless  jumble  of  vanity  and  evil; 
not  to  know  that  it  is  better  not  to  live. 
For  me  not  to  know  this  was  impossible, 
143 


Leo   Tolstoy 

and  when  I  once  saw  the  truth  I  could  not 
shut  my  eyes  to  it.  Another  way  is  to 
make  the  best  of  life  as  it  is,  without  think- 
ing of  the  future.  This  again  I  could  not 
do.  I,  like  Sakya  Muni,  could  not  drive 
to  the  pleasure  ground  when  I  knew  of  the 
existence  of  old  age,  suffering  and  death. 
My  imagination  was  too  lively  for  that. 
Moreover,  my  heart  was  ungladdened  by 
the  passing  joys  which  fell  for  a  few  rare 
instants  to  my  lot.  The  third  way  is, 
knowing  that  life  is  an  evil  and  a  foolish 
thing,  to  put  an  end  to  it,  to  kill  oneself. 
I  understood  this,  but  did  not  kill  myself. 
The  fourth  is  to  accept  life,  as  described 
by  Solomon  and  Schopenhauer,  to  know 
that  it  is  a  stupid  and  ridiculous  joke,  and 
yet  live  on,  to  wash,  dress,  dine,  talk,  and 
even  write  books.  This  position  was  pain- 
ful and  disgusting  to  me,  but  I  remained 
in  it." 

And  now  having  reached  with  Tolstoy 
this    lonely    place    from    which   he    looks 
across  the  dark  and  senseless  waters  of  an 
144 


Leo  Tolstoy 

infinite  sea,  let  us — and  it  is  a  much  pleas- 
anter  task,  though  not  more  valuable  for 
ourselves — (let  us)  make  plain  to  ourselves 
what  considerations  led  him  away  from  the 
dizzy  brink  and  brought  him  back  into  the 
warm  circle  of  our  common  life.  I  have 
said  that  he  stood  upon  the  last  shelf  of 
things  looking  out  into  the  blankness. 
Well,  it  is  only  the  truth  to  say  that  his  first 
step  back  from  that  place  was  taken  when 
he  turned  his  face  and  began  to  look  back 
into  life.  For  the  solution  of  life  must  be 
found,  and  is  found,  within  life  itself — 
though  the  saving  clue  may  be  very  deep 
and  very  fugitive  and  obscure.  We  saw, 
a  moment  ago,  that  Tolstoy  admitted  that 
there  was  one  way  of  getting  out  of  the  dif- 
ficulty, out  of  the  contradiction  between  life 
and  faith,  or  rather  between  life  and  reason. 
He  could  put  an  end  to  his  life,  but  the 
fact  is,  he  went  on  living.  Why  was  that  ? 
We  have  his  word  for  it  that  it  was  not 
cowardice.  It  was  not  that  he  was  re- 
strained by  thinking  of  his  family.  No,  he 
10  H5 


Leo  Tolstoy 

tells  us,  it  was  because  that  course  seemed 
wrong  and  impossible  for  him.  The  same 
force  of  reason  which  made  him  dissatisfied 
with  every  theory  of  life  urged  him  never- 
theless to  keep  in  life.  To  put  the  same 
thing  in  another  way.  It  did  seem  that  no 
quite  reasonable  defence  of  life  could  be 
given.  You  could  not  say  "this"  or 
"  that "  is  the  meaning  of  life,  and  it  is  a 
meaning  which  is  not  destroyed  by  death. 
And  yet,  there  were — to  quote  Pascal — 
reasons,  it  would  appear,  beyond  reason. 
There  was  the  instinct  to  live,  which,  to 
say  no  more,  was  as  truly  part  of  man's 
nature  as  those  powers  of  reasoning  which 
had  up  to  this  point  brought  him  all  his 
trouble.  Reason — the  intellectual  faculty, 
the  critical  faculty — had  its  place,  and  must 
not  be  denied;  but  there  was  something 
deeper.  There  was  life  itself,  of  which 
reason  was  but  a  late  fruit.  There  was  this 
ineradicable  instinct  with  its  claims,  its  in- 
sistence, the  instinct  to  live ;  and  looking  into 
the  heart  of  that  instinct,  he  saw  that  it  was 
146 


Leo  Tolstoy 

itself  a  kind  of  faith.  The  instinct  to  live 
was  but  the  unconscious  belief  with  which 
every  man  was  endowed,  that  somehow 
life — and  it  followed  a  full  true  life — is  pos- 
sible, and  therefore  is  demanded  by  the 
Author  of  our  being-.  This  result,  though 
it  may  be  stated  thus  briefly,  became  clear 
to  Tolstoy  first  in  glorious  moments  of 
insight,  of  self-surrender,  and  only  after- 
wards became  the  ground-work  of  his  con- 
vinced and  logical  doctrine  of  life.  But 
my  point  is  that  his  face  is  now  turned  the 
other  way,  turned  home,  turned  towards 
the  reconciliation,  however  remote  he  may 
still  be  from  perfect  intellectual  satisfaction. 
You  see  how  the  controversy  is  progess- 
ing  within  him,  and  how  daybreak  is  already 
in  the  sky  for  him  in  a  quotation  from 
Anna  Karenina:  "'In  the  infinitude  of 
time,  of  matter,  of  space,  an  organic  cell  is 
formed,  exists  for  a  moment,  and  bursts. 
That  cell  is  I.'  This  was  a  gloomy  sophism. 
He  saw  in  it  the  cruel  jest  of  some  evil 
spirit.  And  Levin,  the  happy  father  of  a 

147 


Leo  Tolstoy 

family,  a  man  in  perfect  health,  was  some- 
times so  tempted  to  commit  suicide,  that  he 
hid  ropes  from  sight  lest  he  should  hang  him- 
self, and  feared  to  go  out  with  his  gun  lest  he 
should  shoot  himself."  But  so  long  as  he 
pursues  the  old  energetic  life,  he  feels  that 
he  is  useful  and  happy.  And  when,  in  the 
field  one  day,  an  old  Mujik  tells  him  of  a 
certain  "honest  man"  who  "lives  for  the 
Soul  and  remembers  God,"  these  simple, 
old-fashioned  words  have  an  extraordinary 
effect  upon  him — "the  effect  of  an  electric 
spark  suddenly  condensing  the  clouds  of 
dim,  incoherent  thoughts" — so  that  "he  felt 
that  some  new  impulse  inexplicable  as  yet 
filled  his  heart  with  joy."  Now,  the  faith 
that  Tolstoy  was  in  search  o£  was  not 
something  which  would  save  him  the 
troubles  and  penalties  of  thought.  And  it 
was  not  something  which  would  justify  him 
in  being  morally  idle,  like  those  who  say 
"God's  in  His  heaven,  all's  right  with  the 
world" — and  themselves  do  nothing.  The 
faith  which  Tolstoy  was  seeking  was,  such 
148 


Leo   Tolstoy 

a  way  ot  looking  at  things  as  would  sup- 
port and  justify  him  in  consecrating  and 
quickening  and  bringing  to  their  fulfilment 
"those  ancient,  instinctive,  vital  currents 
that  hold  the  goodness  of  the  race  and 
carry  it  on  from  age  to  age."  Tolstoy 
came  into  faith,  when  he  accepted  as  the 
habit  of  his  mind,  as  the  law  of  his  nature, 
that  inner  blessedness  which  so  far  had 
come  to  him  only  in  moments,  only  in 
flashes.  He  remembered  that  those  mo- 
ments, those  flashes  of  inner  blessedness 
had  come  to  him  always  when  he  was  done 
with  self-seeking;  always  when  he  had 
given  up  the  life  of  worrying  thought ;  al- 
ways when  he  had  taken  life  for  granted; 
always  when  he  yielded  himself  to  a  pro- 
found current  of  generosity,  of  human  ten- 
derness, of  brotherhood  which  was  there,  as 
much  there  as  this  more  superficial  faculty  of 
reason .  An  d  it  at  last  came  home  to  him  that 
a  man  \tesfaith,  has  a  personal  and  uncon- 
querable belief,  has  at  length  a  hold  upon 
the  true  meaning  of  life,  who  regards  it  as 
149 


Leo  Tolstoy 

his  one  duty,  and  the  very  reason  for  his 
existence,  to  keep  his  own  soul  at  the 
angle  of  love,  at  that  angle  which  catches 
and  reflects  a  certain  profound  and  unut- 
terable joy.  "Faith  is  love  in  a  common 
life." 

He  saw  that  all  our  intellectual  misery 
raises  from  us  men  trying  to  do  what  is 
none  of  our  business,  namely,  to  discover 
the  origin  of  life.  Our  business  is  only 
with  duties,  with  obedience,  with  our  own 
passage  and  striving  from  evil  to  good.  The 
men  who  bother  themselves  about  the  origin 
of  life,  when  they  ought  to  be  concerned  with 
its  aim,  Tolstoy  likens  to  a  "miller  who,  con- 
cluding that  all  the  success  or  failure  of  his 
mill  depends  upon  the  river,  allows  the 
machinery  to  go  to  pieces,  and  notwith- 
standing the  counsel  of  his  neighbors,  at 
last  persuades  himself  that  the  river  is  the 
mill." 

Another  mistake  which,  as  Tolstoy  now 
saw  he  had  been  making,  was  that  he  had 
been  asking  the  meaning  of  life  from  men 

'50 


Leo   Tolstoy 

who,  like  himself,  did  not  know  it.  That  was 
as  reasonable  as  it  would  be  to  go  amongst 
invalids,  asking  first  one  and  then  another, 
the  secret  of  health.  If  he  wanted  to 
know  the  meaning  of  life,  the  proper  course 
for  him  was  to  consult  that  body  of  the  peo- 
ple in  whom,  up  to  this  point,  the  unity  of 
the  soul  has  been  maintained  ;  those  peo- 
ple who  still  live  by  an  elementary  principle 
of  life,  an  instinctive  consciousness  which 
they  do  not  ask  to  have  explained  to  them, 
that  life  itself,  with  all  it  holds,  is  good,  is 
right. 

He  went  to  the  peasantry,  to  those 
who  create  life,  and  their  life  appeared  to 
him  in  its  true  significance.  "I  under- 
stood that  this  was  life  itself — this  namely, 
labour,  brotherhood — and  that  the  mean- 
ing given  to  this  life  was  a  true  one,  and 
I  accepted  it." 

"The  more  I  studied  the  lives  and  doc- 
trines of  the  people,  the  more  I  became 
convinced  that  a  true  faith  was  among 
them,  that  their  faith  was  for  them  a  neces- 


Ley   Tolstoy 

sary  thing,  and  alone  gave  them  a  meaning 
in  life  and  a  possibility  of  living.  In  direct 
opposition  to  what  I  saw  in  my  own  circle 
— the  possibility  of  living  without  faith,  and 
not  one  in  a  thousand  who  professed  him- 
self a  believer — amongst  the  people  there 
was  not  amongst  thousands  a  single  un- 
believer. In  direct  opposition  to  what  I 
saw  in  my  circle — a  whole  life  spent  in 
idleness,  amusement,  and  dissatisfaction 
with  life — I  saw  among  the  people  whole 
lives  passed  in  heavy  labour  and  unrepining 
content.  In  direct  opposition  to  what  I 
saw  in  my  own  circle — men  resisting,  and 
indignant  with  the  privations  and  sufferings 
of  their  lot — the  people  unhesitatingly  and 
unresistingly  accepting  illness  and  sorrow, 
in  the  quiet  and  firm  conviction  that  all 
was  for  the  best.  In  contradiction  to  the 
theory  that  the  less  learned  we  are  the  less 
we  understand  the  meaning  of  life,  and  see 
in  our  sufferings  and  death  but  an  evil 
joke — those  men  of  the  people  live,  suffer, 
and  draw  near  to  death,  in  quiet  confidence 
152 


Leo  Tolstoy 

and  oftenest  with  joy.  In  contradiction  to 
the  fact  that  an  easy  death  without  terror 
or  despair,  is  a  rare  exception  in  my  own 
class — a  death  which  is  uneasy,  rebellious, 
and  sorrowful,  is  among  the  people  the 
rarest  exception  of  all.  These  men,  de- 
prived of  all  that  for  us  and  for  Solomon, 
makes  the  only  good  in  life,  experience  the 
highest  happiness  both  in  amount  and 
kind.  I  looked  more  carefully  and  more 
widely  around  me,  I  studied  the  lives  of 
the  past  and  contemporary  masses  of  hu- 
manity, and  I  saw  that  not  two  or  three, 
not  ten  or  a  hundred,  but  thousands  and 
millions  had  so  understood  the  meaning  of 
life,  that  they  were  both  able  to  live  and 
to  die.  All  these  men,  infinitely  divided  by 
manners,  powers  of  mind,  education,  and 
position,  all  alike  in  opposition  to  my  ig- 
norance, were  well  acquainted  with  the 
meaning  of  life  and  of  death,  quietly  la- 
boured on  and  endured  privation  and  suf- 
fering, lived  and  died,  and  saw  in  all  this 
not  a  vain,  but  a  good  thing." 

153 


Leo  Tolstoy 

My  task  is  done :  for  in  the  Kingdom 
of  the  Spirit  a  man  is  already  home  whose 
face  is  turned  homewards.  From  this 
point,  Tolstoy  goes  forward  with  an  in- 
creasing positiveness.  He  never  again 
felt  a  shudder  of  the  old  misgiving,  of  the 
last  misgiving.  Once  for  all  he  had  decided 
that  for  him  at  least  life  was  simply  not 
possible  without  faith.  And  by  the  logic 
of  the  heart  he  moved  up  to  that  position 
which  Pater,  by  a  curiously  similar  process, 
attained:  that  since  there  are  certain  pre- 
suppositions, postulates,  beliefs,  without 
which  a  man  simply  cannot  live,  is  not 
this  a  presumption  that  these  presupposi 
tions,  postulates,  beliefs,  do  signify  the 
permanent  universal  truth?  "I  had  only 
to  know  God,  and  I  lived :  I  had  only  to  for- 
get Him,  not  to  believe  in  Him,  and  I 
died.  What  was  this  discouragement  and 
revival  ?  I  do  not  live  when  I  lose  faith  in 
the  existence  of  a  God  ;  I  should  long  ago 
have  killed  myself  if  I  had  not  had  a  dim 
hope  of  finding  Him.  I  only  really  live 
154 


Leo  Tolstoy 

when  I  feel,  and  seek  Him.  What  more 
then  do  I  ask  ?  And  a  voice  seemed  to 
cry  within  me,  'This  is  He,  He  without 
whom  there  is  no  life !  To  know  God  and 
to  live  are  One.  God  is  Life.  Live  to 
seek  God  and  life  will  not  be  without 
Him.'  And  stronger  than  ever  rose  up  life 
within  me  and  around  me,  and  the  light 
that  then  shone  never  left  me  again." 

The  last  written  words  of  Tolstoy,  to 
which  I  have  access,  very  fittingly  conclude 
this  sketch  of  his  spiritual  career.  He  is 
dealing  with  the  great  human  fact  of 
Death,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  was  wont 
to  loom  so  bodingly  through  all  his 
thoughts,  numbing  all  his  energies  in  a 
certain  heart-sickness.  Observe  what  a 
tame  creature  Death  is  to  him  now. 

"  Man  cannot,  while  living  in  this  world 
in  a  bodily  form,  picture  life  to  himself 
otherwise  than  in  space  and  time  ;  he  there- 
fore naturally  asks,  where  he  will  be  after 
death  ?  But  this  question  is  wrongly  put. 
When  the  divine  essence  of  the  soul  which 

155 


Leo   Tolstoy 

is  spiritual,  independent  of  time  and  space, 
enclosed  in  the  body  in  this  life — when  this 
divine  essence  leaves  the  body  it  ceases  to 
be  conditioned  by  time  or  space,  and  there- 
fore one  cannot  say  of  this  essence  that  it 
will  be.  It  is.  As  Christ  said :  '  Before 
Abraham  was,  I  am  ;  so  also  with  us  all.  If 
we  are,  we  always  have  been,  and  shall  be. 
We  are  .  .  .  Human  reason,  which  can 
work  only  in  the  conditions  of  time  and 
space,  cannot  give  an  answer  concerning 
that  which  is  outside  these  conditions.  One 
thing  only  is  known  to  reason  :  that  the 
divine  essence  does  exist,  that  it  has  been 
growing  while  in  this  world,  and  that,  hav- 
ing attained  a  certain  extent  of  growth,  it 
has  passed  out  of  these  conditions.  Will 
this  essence  still  continue  its  functions  in 
a  separate  form  ?  Will  the  increase  of 
love  produce  a  new  accumulation  ?  These 
are  but  conjectures,  and  of  such  conjec- 
tures there  may  be  many;  but  none  of 
them  can  give  certainty.  One  thing  alone 
is  certain  and  indisputable,  that  which 
156 


Leo  Tolstoy 

Christ  said  when  He  was  dying :  '  Father, 
into  Thy  hands  I  commit  My  spirit.'  That 
is  to  say,  at  death  I  return  whence  I  came. 
And  if  I  believe  that  from  which  I  have  em- 
anated, to  be  reason  and  love  (and  these 
two  realities  I  know),  then  I  shall  joyously 
return  to  Him,  knowing  that  it  will  be  well 
with  me.  Not  only  have  I  no  regret,  but 
I  rejoice  at  the  thought  of  the  passage 
which  awaits  me." 


157 


John  Henry  Newman 


"  If  the  Lord  were  pleased  to  kill  us,  He  would  not  have 
received  a  burnt  offering  and  a  meat  offering  at  our  hand,  neither 
would  He  have  shewed  us  all  these  things,  nor  would  at  this 
time  have  told  such  things  as  these." — The  Book  of  Judges 

"  Are  ye  so  foolish?  having  begun  in  the  spirit  do  ye  now 
make  an  end  in  the  flesh  ? — St.  Paul  to  the  Galatians. 


John  Henry  Newman 

IT  would  be  difficult  to  name  another, 
who,  by  the  force  of  his  solitary  genius 
and  personality,  has  wrought  such  a  change 
in  the  religious  life  of  a  country  as  has 
been  effected  by  the  life  of  John  Henry 
Newman.  It  is  the  bare  truth  that  his  in- 
fluence upon  the  religious  temper  of  Great 
Britain,  notably  upon  England,  indirectly 
upon  all  English-speaking  peoples,  is  at 
this  moment  beyond  all  our  powers  of  cal- 
culating. Not  to  speak  of  those,  who  in 
great  numbers,  have  followed  Newman 
into  the  Church  of  Rome,  his  ideas  with 
regard  to  faith,  with  regard  to  the  proper 
relations  between  faith  and  reason,  with 
regard  to  the  Church — those  ideas  have 
invaded  the  Church  of  England,  which  he 
left,  and  have  now  become  the  working 
basis  of  that  Church.  Since  Newman's 
ii  161 


John  Henry  Newman 

day  the  Church  of  England  has  not  been 
the  same.  Since  his  day  the  note  has  been 
changed;  her  face  is  turned  another  way 
— his  way.  Other  churches  have  felt  his 
influence  to  a  less  degree,  but  all  have  felt 
it,  and  are  destined,  it  may  be,  to  feel  it  still 
more  powerfully,  But  wherever  the  em- 
phasis is  laid  upon  the  Church  as  an  in- 
stitution, rather  than  upon  the  Kingdom  of 
God  as  a  Spirit,  there  Newman's  teaching 
has  found  an  opening,  and,  once  in,  has 
never  been  expelled. 

It  will  only  be  fair  to  myself  to  state 
here  that  whatever  I  may  be  led  to  say  of 
Newman  later  on,  it  is  in  no  case  to  be 
understood  as  casting  doubt  upon  the 
character  of  the  man,  upon  his  sincerity, 
upon  his  anxious  and  scrupulous  purpose 
to  be  loyal  at  each  stage  to  what  at  that 
moment  he  conceived  to  be  his  duty. 

So  much  of  Newman's  work  is  contro- 
versial, and  the  things  he  is  contending  for 
seem  to  men  of  a  different  temperament 
in  many  cases  so  unreal  and  so  unprofit- 
162 


John  Henry  Newman 

able  even  when  they  are  established,  that 
we  may  easily  forget  the  total  contribution 
he  has  made  to  the  spiritual  substance  of 
our  time  and  of  all  time. 

Whatever  we  may  think  of  Newman's 
mental  history,  whatever  criticism  and,  at 
times  impatience  we  may  have  for  the 
reasons  which  he  gives  in  justification  of 
the  various  steps  he  took,  and  of  the  last 
step,  we  must  never  suspect  the  real  hon- 
esty of  the  man — he  being  such  as  he  was 
— his  exact  obedience  to  what  he  conceived 
to  be  the  will  of  God.  It  was  an  error 
here  which  proved  fatal  to  Kingsley  in  his 
controversy  with  Newman.  His  charge 
against  Newman  of  insincerity  and  lying 
should  never  have  been  made.  Newman, 
in  fact,  lived  under  a  light  which  would  be 
intolerable  to  the  majority  of  even  very 
good  men.  Indeed,  as  has  happened  in 
the  case  of  others,  it  was  just  this  very 
sincerity  of  his,  his  exact  obedience  to  his 
own  restless  sense  of  what  was  right,  it 
was  this  which  gave  to  his  behaviour,  as 
163 


John  Henry  Newman 

outsiders  observed  it,  the  appearance  of 
shiftiness  and  planning  and  cowardice. 
For  myself,  if  I  needed  any  proof  that 
Newman  was  entirely  sincere  with  himself, 
that  however  tortuous  and  incalculable  the 
way  he  took,  his  aim  was  always  pure  and 
purged  of  self-seeking,  I  should  only  have 
to  read  the  writings  he  has  left  behind. 
No  man  could  write  English  like  Newman's 
English  who  was  not  himself  a  faithful  man. 
No  one  could  see  so  clearly  and  tell  so  dis- 
tinctly what  he  saw  in  the  inmost  recesses 
of  the  soul  who  was  not  in  the  habit  of  be- 
ing quite  alone  with  himself  and  with  God. 
It  may  be  that,  when  all  is  said,  we 
owe  some  grudges  to  Newman.  It  may 
be  that  he  has  hindered  the  real  progress 
of  the  Kingdom  of  God,  that  he  has  re- 
tarded the  recovery  of  man  from  supersti- 
tion, from  a  natural  love  of  darkness.  It 
is  probably  true  that  he  has  revived 
amongst  us  the  spirit  of  bigotry,  and — 
unless  we  had  safeguards — of  persecution, 
and  thereby  has  compelled  us  and  will 
164 


Henry  Newman 

compel  our  children  to  fight  for  principles 
which,  as  we  thought,  would  never  again 
be  assailed.  Perhaps  he  has  encouraged 
all  the  churches  to  look  backwards  rather 
than  forwards.  Perhaps  he  has  done  much 
to  make  good  men  suspect  their  own  best 
instincts,  to  curb  unduly  within  themselves 
that  darino-  of  the  soul  which  has  been  the 

o 

good  providence  of  the  world.  Perhaps 
he  has  thrown  open  certain  subterranean 
chambers,  concerning  which,  God,  who 
moves  through  history,  ordains  that  once 
closed  they  shall  remain  closed.  Perhaps 
he  has  taught  us  to  REMEMBER  "those 
things  that  are  behind"  which  an  apostle 
bids  us  "forget."  Perhaps  his  whole  in- 
tellectual fabric,  his  whole  scheme  of  life, 
his  premises  and  arguments,  and  his  con- 
clusions, rest  upon  nothing  better  than 
that  natural  terror  of  our  immense  and  un- 
fathomable surroundings,  which  our  re- 
ligion, culminating  as  it  does  in  Christ, 
was  given  to  sanctify,  it  may  be  to  banish, 
for  ever.  Perhaps  Newman's  entire  sys- 

165 


John  Henry  Newman 

tern  rests,  when  all  is  said,  not  upon  revela- 
tion, but  upon  reason,  upon  reason  working 
in  holes  and  corners.  Perhaps  it  all  rests 
not  upon  the  revelation  of  God,  but  upon 
his  own  terrible  analysis  of  man,  which 
way  madness  lies.  Perhaps  it  has,  as  its 
root  idea,  not  that  faith  in  God  to  which 
Christ  invites  us,  but  a  certain  SUSPICION 
of  God,  a  certain  terror  of  what  the  Al- 
mighty might  do  to  us  if  He  were  minded. 
It  may  be  that  all  this  is  a  true  charge 
against  Newman.  Indeed,  it  was  his  boast 
that  he  had  accomplished  many  of  these 
things.  And,  so  far,  we  blame  him. 

Nevertheless,  and  notwithstanding  all 
these  things,  there  is  that  in  Newman  for 
which  all  good  men  will  continue  to  give 
God  thanks,  and  will  be  glad  to  lay  a  rev- 
erent stone  upon  his  cairn.  For  one  thing, 
Newman's  life,  simple  and  severe,  un vexed 
by  any  low  or  unworthy  aim,  strung  rather 
to  the  very  breaking  point  by  the  immediate 
sense  of  God,  was  a  shining  protest  against 
the  easy  and  indolent,  and  almost  patron- 
166 


John  Henry  Newman 

izing  attitude  towards  religion  which  satis- 
fied the  great  mass  of  people  in  his  day. 
One  sees  a  meaning  in  this  man's  coming 
into  our  midst.  He  lived  altogether  for 
God,  in  absolute  surrender  to  what  he  be- 
lieved to  be  God's  will.  The  secular  spirit 
of  his  time,  far  from  tempting  him  gave 
him  pain.  He  was  always  simple,  unaf- 
fected, austere.  He  never  paraded  his 
gifts,  but  rather  in  his  private  conversation, 
as  in  the  pulpit  and  in  his  books,  practised 
a  certain  reserve.  "  God  and  the  human 
soul,"  as  he  again  and  again  declared, 
were  to  him  the  only  two  realities.  This 
was  the  impression  which  he  made  upon 
his  contemporaries,  and  it  is  what  we  feel 
as  we  read  what  he  has  left  behind.  His 
sermons  are  models  of  simplicity,  and  of 
what  was  his  constant  aim — REALITY.  There 
is  nothing  extravagant,  nothing  of  colour 
or  excess  ;  everywhere  there  is  the  atmos- 
phere of  a  high  seriousness,  of  a  certain 
aloofness  from  the  world,  which  at  times 
approaches  contempt  for  it. 
167 


John  Henry  Newman 

Now  that  we  have  alluded  to  his  ser- 
mons, perhaps  we  could  not  do  better  for 
our  present  purpose  than  consider  them 
further,  and  through  them  make  a  definite 
entrance  into  the  proper  mind  of  Newman. 
The  preaching  of  such  a  sensitive  man 
was  sure  to  be  full  of  his  own  story.  Hear- 
ing him  preach,  trained  ears  may  hear 
him  confess. 

Newman  had  many  natural  qualities 
which,  penetrated  as  they  were  by  the 
man's  awful  seriousness,  and  by  his  con- 
viction that  what  he  said  was  true,  made 
him  a  great  preacher.  He  had  a  com- 
manding presence.  He  had  not  the  face 
of  a  common  man.  It  suggested  to  Froude, 
the  historian,  the  features  of  Julius  Caesar  ; 
the  same  combination  of  seriousness  and 
gentleness. 

It  sometimes  happens  that  when  we 
meet  a  man  in  private  whose  writings  we 
have  read,  or  whom  we  have  heard  in 
public,  we  are  disappointed  in  him,  and 
nothing  that  the  man  may  ever  write  or 
1 68 


John  Henry  Newman 

say  afterwards  will  make  htm  an  impres- 
sive figure  for  us.  It  was  not  so  in  New- 
man's case.  Men  who  were  admitted  to 
close  quarters  with  Newman  felt  that  he 
really  possessed  those  reserves  of  intel- 
lectual and  personal  holiness  which  his 
spoken  or  written  words  had  suggested 
to  them. 

It  may  be  that  many  of  his  most  char- 
acteristic sermons  do  not  impress  us.  We 
can  convict  him  of  special  pleading  and 
want  of  fairness  towards  views  other  than 
his  own.  But  nothing  could  surpass,  as 
an  instrument  for  producing  a  keen  im- 
pression upon  selected  minds,  the  severe 
and  chastened  speech,  the  insight,  the 
grace,  the  allusiveness,  the  rage  against  sin, 
the  fine  scorn  for  average  standards  of  life, 
the  superiority  to  the  ways  and  maxims 
of  the  world,  which  are  the  features  of  those 
sermons.  But  they  have  their  defects. 
True  as  they  are,  they  sin  against  the 
whole  truth. 

In  saying  that,  as  I  do  very  deliberately, 
169 


John  Henry  Newman 

I  mean  that  whilst  Newman  knows  the 
human  heart  to  a  weird  and  shaking  depth, 
there  are  levels  of  the  human  heart  which 
he  either  does  not  know  or  will  not  trust. 
He  knows,  almost  too  well,  the  souls 
of  sinking  and  baffled  men  ;  he  does  not 
know  or  will  not  trust  the  testimony  of 
those  whom  God  has  made  glad.  He 
knows  the  soul  in  those  hours  when  a  man 
is  confused,  at  a  loss.  He  knows  a  man 
when — for  one  reason  or  another — his  face 
is  towards  the  darkness.  I  cannot  imagine 
Newman  joining  himself  to  those  women 
of  Bedford,  whom  Bunyan  found  "sitting 
at  a  door  in  the  sun  talking  about  the 
things  of  God.  .  .  .  Their  talk  was 
about  a  new  birth  .  .  .  how  God  had 
visited  their  souls  with  love  in  the  Lord 
Jesus,  and  with  what  words  they  had  been 
refreshed,  comforted,  and  supported  against 
the  temptations  of  the  devil.  .  .  .  And 
methought  they  spake  with  such  pleasant- 
ness of  Scripture  language,  and  with  such 
appearance  of  grace  in  all  they  said  that 
170 


John  Henry  Newman 

they  were  to  me  as  if  they  had  found  a 
new  world.  .  .  ." 

The  atmosphere  which  surrounds  New- 
man is  so  different  in  quality  from  that, 
that  it  is  only  a  firm  way  of  stating  the 
difference  to  ask  whether  Newman  or  Bun- 
yan  believed  ultimately  in  the  same  God ! 

Newman  knows  the  human  soul,  but 
for  the  most  part  only  on  its  dark  and 
troubled  side.  He  knows  it  in  its  varied  dis- 
asters, in  the  hours  when  mere  knowledge 
fails,  when  the  things  in  which  he  trusted 
mock  a  man.  Indeed  there  is  in  all  New- 
man's preaching  a  kind  of  mocking  at  man. 

To  describe  this  atmosphere  which  in- 
fects his  preaching  from  another  point  of 
view ;  he  never  uplifts  you.  He  suspects 
all  the  kindly  humanities.  He  knows  your 
secret,  rather  than  God's  secret  for  you. 
He  knows  you  and  yet  with  a  certain  in- 
justice. He  does  not  know  you  at  your 
best.  He  knows  how  to  corner  you,  how 
to  crush  you,  how  to  expose  you.  He  will 
not  give  you  the  benefit  of  the  doubt.  His 
171 


John  Henry  Newman 

words  do  not,  speaking  properly,  humble 
you  ;  for  when  we  are  humble  we  are  ready 
to  believe ;  his  words  humiliate  you ;  and 
when  we  are  humiliated  we  are  ready  to 
despair,  to  plunge  into  any  abyss. 

The  one  proper  effect  of  all  Newman's 
preaching  seems  to  me  this,  to  make  men 
feel  insecure,  to  make  them  confused,  at  a 
loss,  desperate,  ready  to  give  themselves 
over  to  a  certain  slavish  panic  to  some  au- 
thority which  could  hardly  be  anything  else 
except  visible  and  external  and  self-con- 
tained. There  is  no  logical  course  for  the 
man  who  wrote  Newman's  Anglican  Ser- 
mons, or  for  one  who  believes  them  to 
contain  the  whole  truth  about  God  and 
man,  except  ultimately  to  do  what  New- 
man did,  abandon  his  own  inherent  right 
as  a  man  to  think,  shrink  from  the  splendid 
perils  of  responsibility,  and  thus  fall  a  victim 
to  the  fascination  of  a  church  which  makes 
the  prostration  of  the  reason  the  first  con- 
dition of  communion  with  her,  and  her  un- 
relenting terms  of  peace. 
172 


Henry  Newman 

In  all  the  quotations  which  we  may 
subsequently  make  from  Newman,  you 
will  feel  that  the  real  effect  is  always  as  I  have 
said — to  baffle  you,  to  lead  you  to  suspect 
yourself,  to  make  you  timid  and  uneasy, 
contemptible  in  your  own  eyes  and  ready 
to  surrender.  You  will  feel  that  whatever 
power  his  words  and  ideas  may  have,  rests 
upon  a  certain  element  of  terror  in  the  hu- 
man soul  which,  even  according  to  our  faith, 
is  not  the  earliest  or  the  deepest  faculty  in 
man,  but  something  which  invaded  man  and 
remains  for  ever  opposed  to  God's  idea 
of  man. 

Granted  that  this  terror — which  let  me 
say,  by  the  way,  might  be  aroused  and  let 
loose  within  us  to  a  pitch  that  would  have 
more  than  served  Newman's  purpose,  I 
mean  even  to  the  point  of  madness — 
granted  that  this  terror  is  a  true  faculty  of 
the  human  soul,  it  is  not  the  only  faculty, 
nor  is  it  at  all  the  faculty  by  which  man 
has  come  into  his  spiritual  inheritance  thus 
far.  The  love  of  life  is  as  deep  as  the  fear  of 

173 


John  Henry  Newman 

life — nay,  it  must  be  deeper.  The  pro- 
found sense  which  has  its  roots  below 
consciousness,  and  appears  most  sweetly 
in  little  children,  whom  Christ  instanced — 
the  profound  sense  that  it  is  a  friendly 
world  into  which  we  have  come,  and  that 
life  is  an  opportunity  rather  than  a  risk — 
it  is  that  wholesome  instinct,  purified  in- 
deed by  fear,  confirmed  by  faith,  on  which 
man  has  come  thus  far.  And,  to  close  this 
portion  of  our  survey,  on  which  we  may 
have  dealt  disproportionately,  dough's 
triumphant  line  stands:  "If  hopes  were 
dupes,  fears  may  be  liars."  If  we  are 
wrong  in  our  hopes  we  may  be  wrong  in 
our  fears,  for  both  reside  indestructibly 
within  the  human  heart,  and  Christ  came 
into  the  world  to  put  an  end  to  man's  an- 
cient timidity  and  misgiving.  In  the  bal- 
ance of  man's  hopes  and  fears  Christ 
entered  the  scale  of  man's  hopes.  Let  not 
your  heart  be  agitated  (the  very  trembling 
of  a  balance  is  indicated),  BELIEVE  in  God, 
in  Me,  in  the  future ! 

174 


John  Henry  Newman 

Whilst  it  is  true  that  Newman  avoids 
all  excess  or  exuberance  in  his  language, 
and  compels  himself  at  all  times  to  say  less 
than  he  might  have  said,  he  had  neverthe- 
less a  most  dramatic  and  impressive  way 
of  delivering  his  message.  For  example, 
do  you  know  anything  more  startling  than 
this  sentence  from  his  "Apologia  " — (a  sen- 
tence which,  in  the  judgment  of  the  late 
Bishop  Westcott,  shares  with  another  in 
Browning's  "  Muleykeh  "  the  rank  of  being 
the  most  pregnant  line  in  the  whole  range 
of  literature)?  Newman  is  speaking  of  his 
own  private  belief  in  God  and  of  the  poor 
and  shifty  ground  on  which  it  rests  apart 
from  the  authority  of  some  external  and 
abiding  institution,  and  Here  is  how  he  de- 
livers himself: — 

''Starting  then  with  the  being  of  a 
God  (which,  as  I  have  said,  is  as  certain 
to  me  as  the  certainty  of  my  own  existence, 
though  when  I  try  to  put  the  grounds  of 
that  certainty  into  logical  shape  I  find  a 
difficulty  in  doing  so  in  mood  and  in  figure 

175 


John  Henry  Newman 

to  my  satisfaction),  I  look  out  of  myself 
into  the  world  of  men,  and  there  I  see  a 
sight  which  fills  me  with  unspeakable  dis- 
tress. The  world  seems  simply  to  give  the 
lie  to  that  great  truth  of  which  my  whole  be- 
ing is  so  full,  and  the  effect  upon  me  is  in 
consequence,  as  a  matter  of  necessity,  as 
confusing  as  if  it  denied  that  I  am  in  exist- 
ence myself."  Here  follows  the  sentence 
which  I  wish  you  to  note.  "  If  I  LOOKED  INTO 

A  MIRROR  AND  DID  NOT  SEE  MY  FACE,  I  should 

have  the  sort  of  feeling  which  actually 
comes  upon  me  when  I  look  into  this  liv- 
ing world  and  see  no  reflection  of  its 
Creator."  He  then  proceeds  to  show  how 
the  Roman  Church  is  the  witness  and  sup- 
port of  his  belief,  but  gives  reasons  which 
have  no  force  for  those  of  us  who,  to  say 
no  more,  hold  that  the  real  knowledge  of 
God  is  always  by  faith,  not  by  sight,  and 
is,  strictly  speaking,  personal  and  incom- 
municable, the  gift  of  God  Himself.  "  Hope 
that  is  seen  is  not  hope,  for  what  a  man  seeth 
why  doth  he  yet  hope  for  ?  But  if  we  hope 
176 


John  Henry  Newman 

for  that  which  we  see  not,  then  do  we  with 
patience  wait  for  it ;  and  the  Spirit  also 
maketh  intercession  for  us  with  groanings 
which  cannot  be  uttered."  And  again : 
"  Faith  is  the  substance  of  things  hoped 
for,  the  evidence  of  things  NOT  SEEN." 

But  those  words,  with  their  swift  hor- 
ror, with  their  touch,  as  one  might  say,  of 
madness — "if  I  looked  into  a  mirror  and 
did  not  see  my  face" — may  serve  as  an 
example  of  Newman's  tremendous  power 
with  words  ;  they  may  serve  at  the  same 
time  as  an  illustration  of  the  kind  of  as- 
sault which  his  preaching  makes  upon  his 
readers.  He  looks  into  the  human  heart 
and  sees  no  sign  of  God.  He  looks  across 
the  fields  of  secular  history  or  into  the  laws 
and  processes  of  the  natural  world,  and  he 
finds  no  steadfast  ground  of  faith.  One 
by  one  he  puts  out  the  kindly  lights — the 
little  genialities  and  courtesies  which  even 
the  uncouth  world  permits  itself  to  show 
us.  He  awakens  misgivings,  he  raises 
doubts  where,  as  you  imagined,  everything 

177 


was  well  secured.  He  will  not  suffer  you 
to  rest  your  faith,  or  take  encouragement 
for  faith,  in  anything  within  your  own 
moral  or  emotional  experience,  in  any  feel- 
ing or  mood  or  purpose,  however  gener- 
ous and  unworldly  it  may  seem  to  you. 
And  then,  though,  to  speak  fairly  of  New- 
man, he  did  not  for  many  years  see  that 
this  was  inevitable — then,  when  you  are 
crying  for  something  to  believe  in,  for 
something  apart  from  your  own  glancing 
and  unsteadfast  moods,  which  have  now  be- 
come suspect ;  for  something  that  will  end 
the  strife  of  doubt  and  misery  ;  as  you  pic- 
ture yourself  alone  in  the  midst  of  your 
awful  surroundings  in  this  world  and  in  the 
world  to  come — you  are  ready  to  hear  of 
an  Infallible  Church  which  will  release  you 
from  thinking,  and  are  ready,  not  in  faith, 
but  in  despair,  to  cast  yourself  into  her 
arms. 

His  most  powerful  passages  are  just 
those  in  which  he  is  demonstrating  how 
helpless  we  are  even  by  the  help  of  God 

.78 


John  Henry  Newman 

(as  it  would  seem)  to  think  out  our  way  in 
this  world ;  how  difficult,  how  mysterious 
our  human  lot  is,  how  hazardous  therefore 
to  risk  ourselves  upon  the  support  of  any 
mere  feeling,  however  warm,  which  in  a 
moment  has  grown  cold.  And  it  is  all 
true,  if  it  means  that  we  need  to  have  a  per- 
fect confidence  in  God,  and  to  believe  that 
our  security  in  this  world  and  throughout 
eternity  depends  not  upon  our  poor  and 
fitful  holds  on  God,  but  upon  His  Almighty 
hold  on  us.  But  that  is  not  at  all  what 
Newman  means.  In  these  passages  and 
throughout  his  teaching  there  is  a  scarcely 
veiled  contempt  for  man  as  he  is — for  his 
efforts  and  enterprises,  for  his  confidence 
in  his  own  reason  and  endowments.  Even 
where  it  is  not  his  set  purpose  to  dishearten 
a  man,  to  poison  the  wells  for  him,  taking 
away  his  self-respect,  that  is  in  nearly  every 
case  the  effect  of  Newman's  preaching. 
As  we  listen,  the  feeling  creeps  over  us 
like  a  cold  hand  that  it  is  almost  an  imper- 
tinence for  us  to  think  for  ourselves,  or  to 
179 


John  Henry  Newman 

rely  upon  any  instinct  of  our  own ;  that  we 
are  in  a  hopeless  case  ;  that  the  best  thing 
that  could  happen  to  us  would  be  for  some 
strong  Company  (so  to  speak)  to  take 
over  our  miserable  private  business. 

I  believe  it  is  quite  just  to  Newman  to 
say  that  though  there  are  shades  and  de- 
grees, and  though  different  people  will  feel 
what  he  says  in  different  ways,  this  is  al- 
ways the  kind  of  effect  which  his  message 
leaves.  You  are  crushed.  You  are  over- 
whelmed. It  may  be,  you  are  mocked. 
He  undermines  your  self-respect,  and  thus 
leaves  you  either  agnostic  or  superstitious. 
Henceforth,  you  are  ready  to  believe  noth- 
ing, or  you  are  prepared  to  believe  any- 
thing. But  he  takes  all  effort  from  you, 
all  desire  to  help  yourself.  You  weep,  it 
may  be.  Yes,  once  or  twice,  Newman 
might  even  lead  us  to  shed  tears.  But 
they  are  not  our  best  tears.  They  are 
blinding  tears,  not  the  tears  God  some- 
times gives  us,  through  which  we  see 
shining  gates  in  front.  No;  you  weep, 
1 80 


John  Henry  Newman 

not  for  your  sin,  but  simply  because  you 
are  thinking  what  a  blunder  everything  is, 
and  that  there  is  no  way  out  of  the  en- 
tanglement except  by  a  sacrifice  of  a  kind 
that,  as  you  somehow  feel,  a  loving  God 
need  not  have  asked  of  you. 

And  now,  let  us  review  some  of  the 
salient  points  in  Newman's  public  career 
and  in  the  history  of  his  religious  opinions. 

The  question  is  often  asked,  how  was 
it  possible  for  a  man  of  Newman's  strength 
to  take  the  journey  which  he  took  and  to 
end  where  he  ended.  The  best  answer,  I 
think,  is  to  say  that  Newman  was  born  a 
Roman  Catholic.  I  mean,  that  according 
to  his  own  story,  from  the  time  when  he 
first  formed  ideas  for  himself,  he  showed  a 
tendency  towards  that  prostration  of  his 
reason  before  authority,  an  inability  to  en- 
dure suspense,  which  were  sure  in  all  his 
circumstances  to  lead  him,  where  as  a  mat- 
ter of  history,  they  did  lead  him.  He  him- 
self tells  us  that  when  he  was  quite  a  boy, 
181 


John  Henry  Newman 

about  ten  years  of  age,  he  had  a  verse 
book  in  which,  at  the  heading  of  the  page, 
he  drew  as  it  were  instinctively  a  solid 
cross.  He  was  always  superstitious.  On 
entering  into  a  dark  passage  or  room,  he 
invariably  made  the  sign  of  the  cross. 
This  happened  long  before  he  adopted 
Roman  opinions.  It  seems  to  have  been 
with  him  a  matter  of  temperament  or  in- 
stinct. In  his  youth  he  read  the  books 
which  were  written  to  controvert  the  Chris- 
tian faith.  These,  however,  made  no  im- 
pression upon  him.  This  may  have  been 
so,  because  he  had  answers  for  the  sceptics ; 
but  more  probably  it  was  due  to  his  inborn 
habitof  believing.  He  never  passed  through 
a  period  of  real  and  fundamental  doubt. 
He  knew  the  difficulties  that  men  were 
raising  with  regard  to  faith,  the  questions 
which  were  being  asked  ;but  I  doubt  whether 
he  ever  felt  the  direct  challenge  of  them. 
He  had  made  up  his  mind.  By  the  time 
he  was  sixteen  he  had  already  resolved  to 
enter  the  Church.  In  due  course  he  went 
182 


John  Henry  Newman 

to  Oxford.  There  were  some  notable  stu- 
dents in  his  time.  Gladstone  was  there. 
Whateley,  John  Keble,  Pusey,  Williams, 
Marriott,  and, —  Hurrell  Froude,  who 
really  awakened  Newman  and  set  him  his 
course.  Dr.  Arnold,  of  Rugby,  had  just 
left.  Jowett,  Temple,  the  writers  of  the 
Essays  and  Reviews,  were  coming  or  had 
come.  It  was  a  stirring  time,  both  in  pol- 
itics and  religion.  There  were  rumblings 
which  might  signify  anything.  There  were 
shrewd  minds  in  those  days,  who  expected 
nothing  less  than  the  disestablishment  of 
the  Church,  and  who  saw  in  the  distress  of 
the  time  and  in  the  sullenness  of  popular 
opinion,  the  spectre  of  an  immense,  and  it 
might  be,  a  bloody  revolution.  For  one 
thing,  it  was  still  the  days  of  the  Corn 
Laws  ;  and  for  another  thing,  Queen  Vic- 
toria, that  good  woman  had  not  yet  come 
to  the  throne.  The  year  1832  was  ap- 
proaching. Reform  was  in  the  air.  The 
Bill  for  the  Emancipation  of  Catholics  was 
before  Parliament.  It  was  characteristic  ot 
183 


John  Henry  Newman 

Newman  and  his  friends  that  they  opposed 
that  Bill.  I  say,  it  was  characteristic  of  one 
who,  I  believe,  never  shrank  from  saying 
openly  that  truth,  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
had  to  be  defended  from  heretics  and 
schismatics,  if  need  be,  by  the  power  of 
the  civil  arm,  by  persecution  and  disabilities. 

In  his  opposition  to  Catholic  Emanci- 
pation, Newman  manifested  that  hatred  of 
all  that  we  call  progress  which  was  in- 
stinctive with  him  and  explains  everything. 

And  it  was  not  only  in  the  sphere  of 
politics,  but  in  the  sphere  of  religion  itself, 
that  the  spirit  of  inquiry  and  readjustment 
was  abroad.  New  opinions  were  begin- 
ning to  be  held  as  to  the  authority  of  the 
Scriptures.  Science,  in  our  modern  sense, 
had  begun  to  assail  and  to  undermine  all 
established  opinions  on  the  facts  of  nature, 
and  on  the  genesis  of  man.  It  seemed  to 
Newman  that  the  ark  of  the  Lord  was  in 
danger.  He  did  not  for  a  moment  con- 
sider whether  the  time  into  which  he  had 
been  born  might  not  be  one  of  those  times 
184 


John  Henry  Newman 

which  need  to  come,  when  the  human  mind 
is  called  upon  to  rid  itself  of  encumbrances, 
for  which  it  has  no  urgent  need,  in  order 
that  it  may  acquire  new  treasures,  and  new 
confirmations  for  its  faith  in  the  new  coun- 
try to  which  all  things  are  inviting  it.  New- 
man, and  those  who  were  with  him,  were 
genuinely  afraid  that  in  sweeping  the  house 
for  the  lost  treasure,  men  might  sweep  out 
the  treasure  itself;  or  to  vary  the  metaphor, 
and  to  quote  our  most  ingenious  and 
spirited  apologist,  they  were  afraid  that  in 
emptying  out  the  bath,  men  might  empty 
out  the  baby  too. 

But  here  as  elsewhere,  Newman  was 
guided  not  so  much  by  reasons  as  by  the 
whole  bias  of  his  nature.  All  change  was 
hateful  to  him.  He  suspected  research 
and  was  never  weary  of  showing  how  in- 
adequate all  men's  words  are  to  deal  with 
those  mysteries  and  elusive  facts  which 
they  presume  to  describe.  To  him,  faith 
was  above  everything  else,  obedience  to 
authority,  the  unconditional,  and  if  need  be, 
185 


John  Henry  Newman 

the  abject  surrender  of  the  human  reason 
to  the  doctrines  of  the  Church.  It  was  about 
this  time,  that  he  conceived  a  hatred  towards 
the  work  of  Luther  and  the  Reformers. 
He  often  declared  that  "the  spirit  of  lawless- 
ness came  in  with  the  Reformation,  and 
liberalism  is  its  offspring."  He  confessed 
that  he  had  a  horror  of  the  principle  of 
private  judgment.  In  short,  Newman 
was  always  on  his  way  to  Rome,  though 
he  was  not  always  aware  of  it. 

The  position  which  Newman  occupied 
could  not  long  withstand  the  gnawing  as- 
saults of  his  own  restless  logic.  He  held 
that  the  doctrines  of  the  Christian  religion 
— and  in  his  teaching  it  is  always  these, 
and  not  spiritual  obedience  which  are  the 
objects  of  faith — had  been  delivered  to  the 
Church.  The  Anglican  Church  having,  as 
he  thought  at  this  time,  an  unbroken  de- 
scent from  the  Apostolic  age,  held  the  true 
tradition.  To  believe  was  to  accept  that 
tradition.  He  saw  that  an  Infallible  Bible 
needed  an  Infallible  Interpreter.  If  every 
186 


Henry  Newman 

man  had  the  right  to  make  his  own  inter- 
pretation, where,  then,  would  be  the  guar- 
antee for  unity  and  for  truth?  That  being 
his  position,  Newman  soon  found  himself 
in  difficulties.  In  reading  the  Fathers, 
doubts  began  to  arise  in  his  mind  whether 
his  own  Church,  and  not  the  Roman  Church, 
was  the  true  home  of  authority.  Each 
Church  made  the  claim,  yet  their  testi- 
monies conflicted.  But  history  showed 
him  that  the  Roman  Church  was  more  prim- 
itive, and  the  doubt  arose  whether  the  An- 
glican Church  were  really  Apostolic. 

He  began  to  study  the  constitution  of 
his  Church  and  that  study  confirmed  his 
uneasiness.  He  saw  that  Queen  Elizabeth, 
in  establishing  a  form  of  religion  in  Eng- 
land, was  anxious  to  bring  all  the  religious 
parties  within  the  realm  into  harmony. 
The  Church  must  be  Protestant,  but,  at 
the  same  time,  the  old  Catholic  priests 
must  be  made  welcome  to  its  communion. 
And  so  the  thirty-nine  articles  were  drawn 
up,  with  sufficient  indefiniteness  to  permit 
187 


John  Henry  Newman 

men  who  held  divergent  and  even  contrary 
views  accepting  them,  or  some  of  them. 
As  Newman  realized  all  this,  his  misgiv- 
ings deepened  into  a  conviction  that  the 
Church  of  England  was  not  the  true  Cath- 
olic Church.  He  saw  that  the  Church  of 
England  herself  was  in  doubt  about  those 
very  things  which  were  troubling  him. 
There  was  no  decision  in  her  voice. 

He  looked  across  to  Rome.  For  New- 
man to  look  across  was  ultimately  to  go 
across,  for  he  could  never  endure  the  tor- 
ment of  a  divided  or  hesitating  mind. 

It  was  for  him  a  time  of  very  deep  dis- 
tress, and  he  resolved  to  go  abroad  for 
rest  and  change.  In  company  with  Hur- 
rell  Froude,  he  travelled  in  Italy  and  Sicily. 
Even  then  he  did  not  realize  that  he  was 
drifting  into  the  Church  of  Rome,  although 
it  must  have  been  evident  to  any  one  who 
was  allowed  to  share  his  thoughts  at  that 
time.  His  letters  from  the  Continent  are 
full  of  the  Catholic  services  in  which  he  is 
joining.  The  Roman  Church  fascinates 
1 88 


John  Henry  Newman 

him  by  its  very  bulk,  by  its  unquestioning 
and  unruffled  acceptance  of  things  as  they 
happen  to  have  come  down  through  the 
ages.  It  is  a  curious  and,  to  myself,  a  sad 
spectacle  to  see  any  man  who  has  "  begun 
in  the  Spirit  thinking  that  he  will  be  made 
perfect  by  the  flesh,"  to  see  this  man  blind 
to  all  the  ignorance,  to  the  slavishness,  to 
the  mental  deadness,  to  the  superstition, 
which  were  then  rampant  in  Italy  and 
Sicily — things  for  which  the  Roman  Church 
was  largely  responsible,  and  for  which  she 
ought  to  have  held  herself  responsible — to 
see  this  man  blind  to  all  that,  or  again  ex- 
cusing it  all,  even  praising  it,  because,  at 
any  rate,  in  those  same  regions  there  was 
no  revolt  of  the  human  intelligence  against 
the  tyranny  of  tradition.  It  is  to  me  a 
tragical  point  to  which  a  man  has  reached, 
when,  rather  than  that  men  should  apply 
their  minds  to  the  facts  of  life  and  of  the 
soul,  and  find  reasons,  if  they  need 
reasons,  for  the  faith  that  is  in  them,  he 
would  have  them  sink,  as  far  as  men  may, 
189 


John  Henry  Newman 

to  the  intellectual  imbecility  and  quietness 
of  sheep  that  merely  graze,  and  breed,  and 
die!  For,  "how  much  better  is  a  man 
than  a  sheep  !" 

In  Sicily  severe  illness  overtook  New- 
man. It  was  after  his  recovery,  and  while 
he  was  on  the  voyage  from  Palermo  to 
Marseilles,  that  the  beautiful  hymn,  "  Lead, 
kindly  Light,"  was  written.  It  came  to 
him  as  they  lay  becalmed  for  a  whole  night 
in  the  straits  of  Bonifacio.  He  felt  that, 
like  his  ship,  he  too  was  drifting,  and  he 
hardly  dared  yet  think  what  port  was  likely 
to  receive  him.  Speaking  for  myself,  the 
the  man  who  wrote  "Lead,  kindly  Light," 
was  nearer,  even  as  he  wrote,  to  the  true 
spirit  of  faith  than  the  same  man  in  later 
years,  when  he  had,  by  a  definite,  and,  for 
him,  irrevocable  act  of  self-abandonment, 
sold  his  high,  even  if  perilous,  birth-right. 

The  captain  of  that  orange  boat  which 

bore  Newman  to  Marseilles  was  in  his  own 

sphere,   living  by  the  simple  faith  which 

alone  God  requires  of  men.     He  was  put- 

190 


John  Henry  Newman 

ting  out  to  sea,  and  the  only  assurance 
which  he  had  that  he  would  ever  reach  the 
coast  of  France  was  that  his  ship  had  the 
power  to  float,  that  others  had  set  out  and 
had  arrived,  that  his  compass  was  true,  or,  if 
that  failed,  that  the  stars  would  keep  their 
places  and  would  shine. 

Newman  returned  to  Oxford,  and  con- 
tinued to  preach  for  some  years  in  St. 
Mary's.  It  was  earnest,  searching,  sad 
work,  with  never  a  touch  of  the  joy  of  the 
Lord.  "His  sermons  during  those  years 
appeared  to  be  the  outcome  of  continued 
meditation  upon  his  fellow-creatures  and 
their  position  in  the  world,  their  awful  re- 
sponsibilities, the  mystery  of  their  nature. 
A  tone,  partly  of  fear,  partly  of  infinite 
pity,  runs  through  them  all.  Men  are  met 
on  all  sides  with  difficulties.  Life  seemed 
to  be  not  the  proof,  but  the  contradiction 
of  Christ's  Gospel.  And  in  the  back- 
ground, unexpressed,  but  forming  itself 
into  words,  was  the  unconscious  hint  that 
in  some  visible  community  there  must  lie 
191 


John  Henry  Newman 

the  secret,  in  some  society  must  be  man's 
sole  resting-place."  They  contain  "ex- 
quisite passages,  speaking  the  language  of 
the  world,  yet  most  unworldly,  displaying 
a  subtle  knowledge  of  human  nature" — a 
priest's  knowledge,  I  was  going  to  say — 
"its  twisting-s  and  weaknesses  and  self-de- 

o 

ceptions :  recognizing  with  an  awe  that  ap- 
proaches to  dread  the  impenetrable  mys- 
teries of  the  stupendous  darkness  in  which 
man  for  a  moment  emerges  to  play  his 
little  part  and  vanish  :  well  fitted  to  leave  a 
strong  impression  upon  the  callous  worldli- 
ness  of  men,  and  penetrating  painfully  to 
the  very  heart  of  the  anxious  and  incon- 
sistent Christian."  But  there  is  no  inner 
freedom  in  them,  no  Gospel,  no  good  news, 
no  news  at  all ;  only  the  reiteration  of  that 
natural  despair,  that  terror  of  the  law, 
that  awful  sense  of  forlornness,  which 
would  indeed  still  weigh  us  down  to  death 
if  Jesus  Christ  were  struck  out  of  our 
hearts. 

But   he    was    an    unhappy    man    who 
192 


John  Henry  Newman 

preached  those  eight  volumes  of  Parochial 
and  Plain  Sermons. 

In  1841  Newman  resigned  his  position 
at  St.  Mary's,  and  retired  to  Littlemore,  a 
village  three  miles  from  Oxford.  The  end 
was  near.  In  regard  to  the  Anglican 
Church,  he  was  already,  as  he  describes  it, 
"on  his  death-bed."  In  1843  ne  was  re~ 
ceived  into  the  Church  of  Rome.  He 
underwent  a  short  probation  ;  visited  the 
Pope ;  was  placed  at  the  Oratory  in  Bir- 
mingham ;  became  a  cardinal.  He  died  on 
the  evening  of  the  1 1  th  of  August,  1 890. 
He  tells  us  that  he  experienced  little 
change  on  entering  the  Church  of  Rome. 
He  says  that  all  his  doubts  were  resolved, 
but  from  his  own  account  we  should  rather 
say  that  he  had  given  up  his  very  right  to 
have  doubts,  to  weigh  and  choose  at  least 
"with  all  his  strength,"  and  "with  ALL  HIS 
MIND,"  as  we  are  commanded.  In  short  he 
had  given  up  his  right  to  hold  a  personal 
belief. 

In  drawing  these  notes  and  this  com- 

13  193 


John  Henry  Newman 

mentary  to  a  conclusion,  I  wish  very  hum- 
bly, as  becomes  me,  but  quite  resolutely. 
as  also  becomes  me,  to  offer  three  short 
criticisms  of  Newman's  life-long  principles. 
They  are  criticisms  which  I  must  try  your 
patience  only  so  far  as  to  indicate,  asking 
you,  however,  to  believe  that  they  rest 
upon  well  considered  reasons.  I  said  New- 
man's life-long  principles  ;  for,  as  we  have 
seen,  his  entrance  into  the  Church  of  Rome 
produced  no  real  change  in  his  mental  at- 
titude. That  step  was  for  such  a  man  in- 
evitable, sooner  or  later.  It  was  the  nat- 
ural result  of  a  habit  of  mind  which  New- 
man never  did  anything  to  correct  or 
restrain,  and  concerning  which  he  never 
raised  the  question  whether,  in  the  light  of 
history,  it  was  not  a  habit  of  mind  which 
had  been  responsible  for  some  of  the 
darkest  and  most  ghastly  pages  in  the  an- 
nals c  f  the  race. 

i.  In  the  first    place,  it  would  be  an 
easy  matter   to   show   that    the  thorough 
denial  of  the  right  of  private  judgment  in 
194 


John  Henry  Newman 

matters  of  faith  would  put  an  end  to  faith, 
and  thus  work  its  own  refutation. 

Every  doctrine  of  the  Church,  as  stated 
in  her  formularies,  was,  at  the  outset,  the 
result  of  long  and  at  times  very  bitter  con- 
troversy. Every  doctrinal  statement,  that 
is  to  say,  was  the  result  of  an  accumula- 
tion of  private  judgments  which,  at  a  cer- 
tain point,  became  so  harmonious,  so  rep- 
resentative of  the  dominant  opinion  of  that 
particular  age,  that  the  Church  of  that  age 
gave  its  sanction  and  authority  to  the 
statement. 

And  besides  that :  to  accept  a  doctrine, 
to  assent  to  it,  implies,  if  the  acceptance  is 
to  have  any  value,  an  active  use  of  one's 
mind,  a  certain  deliberateness  and  choosing. 
A  man's  beliefs  ought  not,  surely,  to  be 
things  which  are  fixed  upon  him,  so  to 
speak ;  things  which  he  must  not  even 
read  too  interestedly,  lest  he  should  begin 
to  think  about  them,  and  thus  involuntarily 
deviate  into  pronouncing  secret  judgments 
upon  them.  Surely,  if  a  man's  belief  is 

195 


John  Henry  Newman 

to  retain  any  moral  worth,  or  to  signify 
anything  for  the  man  himself,  or  as  a  testi- 
mony to  the  world,  it  must  have  the  cor- 
roboration  of  his  mind,  the  assent  and  ap- 
proval and  joyful  support  of  his  whole 
manhood. 

Once  more :  while  Newman  denies  the 
right  of  private  judgment  to  decide  in 
matters  of  faith,  he  himself  was  led  by  his 
own  reason,  by  the  restless  exercise  of  all 
his  faculties,  by  his  own  private  and  lonely 
sense  of  what  for  him  was  right  and  neces- 
sary, into  the  Church  of  Rome. 

Newman's  "Apologia"  is  nothing  at 
all  if  it  is  not  a  defence  of  the  right  of  the 
individual  to  judge  upon  matters  of  faith. 
His  private  judgment  led  him  into  Rome: 
another's  private  judgment,  having  weighed 
his  reasons,  may  keep  him  out  of  Rome. 

There  is  no  need  to  doubt  that  once  a 
man  has  made  up  his  mind  that,  so  to  put 
it,  he  ha.s  no  mind  worth  making  up,  once 
a  man  has  made  up  his  mind  that  he  cannot 
think  with  safety,  that  there  is  an  incurable 
196 


vice  or  fault  in  his  thinking  apparatus, 
whenever  he  brings  it  to  bear  upon  re- 
ligion ;  once  that  point  has  been  reached, 
he  will  have  no  further  mental  anguish,  as 
Newman  claims  that  he  had  none  after  he 
took  his  step.  Of  course  not.  A  man,  let 
us  say,  has  a  limb  which  gives  him  great 
pain  at  times,  and  continual  uneasiness. 
He  drags  it  about  with  him  and  in  conse- 
quence spends  miserable  days.  At  length 
he  has  the  limb  amputated.  From  that 
moment,  though  many  are  never  the  same 
after  such  a  shock,  (from  that  moment)  he 
has  not  a  single  twinge  in  the  limb  which 
has  been  taken  off.  Certainly  not :  but  he 
is  less  of  a  man  by  that  limb.  And  so, 
from  the  day  in  which  he  finally  withdrew 
from  his  reason,  the  right  to  think  in  any 
decisive  way  upon  the  doctrinal  state- 
ments and  traditional  claims  of  his  Church, 
from  that  moment  he  seems  able  to  accept 
things  or  helpless  to  reject  them,  which,  in 
other  days  he  would  have  instinctively  re- 
fused. Faith,  having  lost  the  curb  of 
197 


John  Henry  Newman 

reason,  may  appear  at  any  moment  as  the 
most  childish  credulity.  Thus  we  find 
Newman  in  his  later  and  Catholic  writings 
seriously  defending  miracles  which  are 
merely  grotesque,  believing  in  the  virtue  of 
sacred  oils,  and  rags  and  pieces  of  wood, 
maintaining  with  his  matchless  literary 
style,  stories  which  many  an  equally  devout 
person  would  prefer  not  to  believe.  Be- 
cause the  doctrine  of  the  Roman  Church 
declares  that  the  sun  moves  round  the 
earth,  Newman  will  not  say  plainly  that 
there  the  Church  was  wrong,  and  is  wrong. 
Though  even  young  children  know  that 
relatively  to  the  earth  the  sun  stands  still, 
and  that  it  is  the  earth  which  goes  round 
the  sun,  Newman  will  only  ask  with  a  sub- 
tlety and  disingenuousness  which  should 
be  a  warning,  "  How  can  I  say  which  of 
the  two  moves  until  I  know  what  motion 
is?" 

2.  My  second  general  remark,  by  way 
of  criticism  of  Newman's    career  and  its 
conclusion,  is  to  notice  as  characteristic  of 
198 


John  Henry  Newman 

him,  his  attitude  of  suspicion  and  hostility 
towards  the  movements  which  were  pecul- 
iar to  his  time,  movements  which  will  be 
celebrated  in  history,  not  as  deeds  of  dark- 
ness, but  as  eminent  signs  of  the  spirit  and 
energy  of  God. 

In  all  this  suspicion  and  hostility  New- 
man surely  showed  a  lamentable  want  of  con- 
fidence in  God,  a  lamentable  forgetting  of 
the  saying  which  he  tells  us  affected  him  so 
profoundly,  though  in  a  very  pretty  way 
by  comparison  with  this  other — securus 
judicat  orbis  terrarum — which  to  a  believ- 
ing man  simply  means  "  God  rules." 

Newman  saw  nothing  hopeful,  no  ground 
for  thanksgiving,  in  all  the  mental  enter- 
prise of  the  Victorian  age.  To  him  it  was 
all  tainted  with  the  denial  of  God,  and  there- 
fore only  mischievous.  He  never,  so  far 
as  I  can  recall,  gave  God  praise  for  the 
rise  of  hospitals,  infirmaries,  asylums,  for 
the  abolition  of  slavery,  for  the  improve- 
ment in  the  circumstances  in  prison  life, 
for  the  betterment  of  the  general  condition 
199 


John  Henry  Newman 

of  the  people,  or  for  the  marvelous  spread 
of  the  Gospel  and  the  name  of  Christ  in 
heathen  lands.  And  yet  these,  it  may  be, 
as  they  are  signs,  many  of  them,  of  a 
growing  sensitiveness  towards  our  fellow- 
men,  a  growing  sense  of  our  mutual  re- 
sponsibility, may  have  been  the  cathedrals 
which  the  century  was  raising,  witnesses 
and  monuments  of  the  soul  in  man,  and 
thus  to  the  glory  of  God.  This  was  in  no 
way  Newman's  view.  In  his  eyes  the  in- 
tellectual movement  of  the  time  was  but 
the  outbreak  of  man's  sinful  pride,  and  as 
often  as  he  encountered  it,  he  showed  his 
teeth,  as  though  his  bone  were  threatened. 
To  him  it  was  all  little  better  than  the  re- 
bellious building  of  another  Tower  of 
Babel,  and  it  could  only  end  in  a  confusion 
of  tongues. 

3.  My  last  general  remark  is  this: 
There  was  another  alternative  which  always 
lay  open  to  him,  offering  a  solution  of  the 
difficulty  into  which  his  own  embarrassing 
premises  had  led  him. 
200 


John  Henry  Newman 

He  believed  that  Christ  had  founded  a 
Church  on  earth.  Good  !  In  the  Anglican 
Church  he  confessed  that  certain  notes  of 
authority  were  wanting.  The  same  was 
true  of  the  Greek,  the  same  of  the  Roman. 
But  considering  these  things,  that  no  his- 
torical Church  corresponded  even  in  es- 
sential signs  to  the  perfect  ideal  of  the 
Church  of  Christ,  manifesting  God  as  inev- 
itably as  the  sun  radiates  light,  might  he 
not  have  been  led  to  that  conclusion  which 
at  once  puts  all  our  human  enterprises  into 
their  humble  place  and  yet  mocks  none  of 
them,  but  leaves  us  looking  hopefully 
towards  God, — the  conclusion  to  which  the 
apostle  came,  who,  in  his  day,  had  the  care 
of  all  the  Churches,  the  conclusion,  namely, 
that  we  all  of  us  "have  the  treasure  in 
earthen  vessels,  that  the  excellency  of  the 
power  may  be  of  God,  and  not  of  our- 
selves ?"  Making,  as  we  must  ever  make, 
the  deduction  due  to  our  human  weakness, 
surely  it  was  open  to  him  to  see  the  true 
Church  wherever  the  mind  of  Jesus  Christ 
201 


John  Henry  Newman 

was  seeking  to  find  expression  and  a  home! 
True  it  is  that  we  are  far  from  having  yet 
apprehended  that  for  which  Christ  appre- 
hended us.  Nevertheless,  today  every- 
where Christ  is  preached,  and  therein  with 
a  greater  he  might  well  have  rejoiced.  It 
is  the  task  of  all  the  ages,  and  not  of  one  age 
only  to  bring  on  perfection,  when  Christ 
shall  be  all  in  all,  when  "  there  shall  be  no 
Temple  therein  for  the  Lord  God  Almighty 
and  the  Lamb  are  the  Temple  of  it." 

Was  it  not  always  open  to  him  to  break 
away  from  the  purely  worldly  and  physical 
and  apparent  as  tests  and  signs  of  God's 
Presence,  and  to  take  up  that  truly  Catholic 
outlook  upon  this  immense  human  scene, 
acknowledging  in  every  holy  undertaking, 
in  every  advance  of  the  mind  of  Christ 
upon  the  minds  of  men,  in  every  soul 
whom  Christ  inhabits,  in  every  community 
which  bears  evidences  of  the  Holy  Spirit — 
acknowledging  in  these  the  first-fruits  of 
the  coming  harvest,  the  first  and  in  this 
hour  of  time  the  invincible,  rays  of  that 
202 


John  Henry  Newman 

Eternal  light  which  is  coming  and  coming 
through  all  ages,  until  Christ  shall  be  all 
in  all? 

Why,  since  he  could  not  see  all  the 
notes  of  the  perfect  Church  in  any  one 
existing  Church — antiquity,  authority,  sanc- 
tity, and  the  rest,  did  not  Newman,  like 
faithful  Abraham,  still  look  for  the  city 
which  hath  the  foundations,  whose  builder 
and  maker  is  God  ?  Why  did  he  not  aban- 
don that  premiss  which  tormented  and  en- 
tangled him  through  all  his  journey,  a 
premiss  which  was  always  false,  and  in 
contradiction  to  God's  way  everywhere, 
the  premiss  and  first  requirement,  namely, 
that  the  true  and  only  Church  must  of 
necessity  be  one  in  a  visible  and  material 
sense:  why  did  he  not  rise  above  that 
lower  level  of  judging  men  and  institutions, 
and  declare  with  that  greater  preacher  of 
Christ,  who  received  his  message  by  Rev- 
elation of  the  exalted  Lord :  "Jerusalem 
which  is  above  is  free,  which  is  the  Mother 
of  us  all?" 

203 


FURTHER  THOUGHTS 

FROM  MY  NOTE-BOOK  ON  "NEWMAN" 

My  fear  of  unmitigated  "Science"  is  that  it 
will  drive  men  into  superstition. 

"We  were  made  and  meant  for  and  must  have 
God." 

The  truth  underlying  Newman's  "  Pilgrim's 
Progress"  is  the  justice  of  his  appeal  to  history,  to 
life  considered  broadly.  For  it  is  the  fact  that  man 
has  faced  his  tasks,  has  endured  immeasurable  pains, 
and  the  long  monotony  of  his  existence,  by  the  help 
of  his  beliefs,  because  he  has  kept  a  window  open 
to  what  to  him  at  each  stage  was  the  Eternal.  New- 
man was  right  in  feeling,  as  he  did,  that  knowledge 
by  itself  leads  to  death,  and  in  protesting  against  the 
tyranny  of  one  faculty  of  the  soul,  viz. ,  intellectual 
reason,  in  the  name  of  man's  total  nature.  But  he 
failed  to  indicate  the  true  place  which  the  reason 
has  in  matters  of  faith. 

A  truth  (the  converse  truth)  underlies  Huxley's 
phrase,  "the  sin  of  faith,"  the  sin  of  credulity. 

We  must  be  prepared  to  reject  that  which  is  con- 
tradictory to  the  laws  of  our  mind ;  yet  on  the  other 
205 


Notes  on  "Newman" 

side,  we  must  never  forget  that  all  the  great  human 
enterprises — patriotism,  marriage,  fidelity  to  kindred, 
martyrdom,  are  all  works  of  faith — have  been  ac- 
complished and  are  still  pursued,  not  in  obedience  to 
reason,  but  in  obedience  to  mysterious  impulses,  to 
some  divine  enthusiasm  with  which  the  Creator  loaded 
man  at  the  beginning  and  still  replenishes  him,  in 
obedience  to  an  instinct  which  is  blind  to  conse- 
quences, seeing  clearly  only  the  immediate  thing. 

Compare  Balfour's  dominant  idea  in  his  philo- 
sophical writings,  that  all  great  movements  have 
been  "irrational." 

Perhaps  Newman  in  his  search  for  certainty  was 
seeking  something  which  God  has  not  ordained  for 
men. 

I  verily  believe  that  if  we  were  perfectly  sure  of 
God,  so  that  we  could  say  "There  He  is,"  "There 
His  will  is  absolutely,  and  without  the  very  possibility 
of  mistake  to  be  known,"  I  believe  that  it  would 
destroy  all  moral  initiative,  and  would  alter  the  very 
nature  of  the  soul. 

"That  were  the  seeing  God,  no  flesh  shall  dare." 

If  the  entire  world  without  exception  believed 
that  the  Pope  was  God's  actual  plenipotentiary  and 
representative  in  the  world,  really  believed  that  as 
we  believe  that  fire  burns,  it  would  bring  thought 
and  religion  itself  to  an  end.  Cf.  Robert  Buchanan's 
206 


Notes  on  "Newman" 

poem    "The  Eye,"  or  that  passage  in  Browning's 
"The  Ring  and  the  Book, "containing  the  lines: 

"  What,  but  the  weakness  in  a  faith  supplies 
The  incentive  to  humanity  ?  " 

And  then,  as  Professor  James  puts  it,  saying  what 
it  was  high  time  somebody  had  said,  "There  is  that 
within  us  which  is  prepared  to  take  a  risk. ' ' 

"A  religion  which  is  not  a  certainty  is  a  mockery 
and  a  horror"  (Carlyle). 

This  is  the  truth  underlying  Newman's  dialectic. 
Man's  innermost  need  is  for  REST,  for  BONDAGE. 
But  surely  this  must  be  spiritual.  When  the  object 
of  faith  is  something  VISIBLE,  then  it  is  no  longer 
faith,  but  sight,  and  inferior.  Faith  is  of  the  un- 
seen, but  morally  inevitable.  Faith  says  "it  must  be 
so. ' '  Its  intellectual  basis  is  that  in  our  best  hours 
WE  are  not  deceived,  that  our  minds  are  in  harmony 
with  God,  that  HE  has  not  made  man  in  vain. 

May  not  the  incarnation  of  God  in  Christ  have 
as  its  profoundest  interpretation  tms:  that  in  Jesus 
Christ  we  have  God's  sanction  and  corroboration  of 
our  holiest  human  hopes  and  dreams? 

"If  it  were  not  so,  I  would  have  told  you," 
said  Jesus. 

From  this  point  of  view,  Hugo  of  St.  Victor's 
great  saying  is  but  a  passionate  plea  that  life  is  ulti- 
mately reasonable,  that  God  is  just :  Doming  si  error 
tst,  a  Te  decepti  sumus  ! 

2O7 


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